How to Influence What AI Says About Your Brand

You don't have to wait 2 years for strong SEO results. Reddit can get you a page 1 reference straight away. It's like one of the biggest citation sources that Google and others are using. The information that's on these websites that's now determining what's said about your brand may not be accurate, it may not be correct, and, you know, it may not be up to date. I think you need to set up these alerts and ensure that you can jump on these because Reddit threads, some actually close after a period of time and then the information becomes crystallized, right?

It's training that— You can't fix it. What are the best ways to increase the chance of actually being recommended? If I had a dollar for every time I got asked how ChatGPT to recommend my clients in the last few months, I reckon I'd have at least $20. But seriously, AI has completely changed the way that SEO and search actually helps us today. So we've brought in the man who was also made co-founder when Finder's Google traffic was tanking. Jeremy Cabral, welcome to the That F*cking Marketing Podcast.

Thank you for having me.

Now most people might remember Finder as the comparison website. You and your 2 co-founders bootstrapped to, what was it, $680 million?

Yeah, as a valuation. We kind of raised the $30 mil at that valuation, but we bootstrapped to $100 mil. Yeah.

Insane. And I know a big part of that was really the marketing and search strategy behind that. But since then, the whole world has changed again, right?

Exactly.

It's crazy.

Like literally every day is something new.

Yeah. So for someone who's not across everything right now, can you tell us what's changed with Google and SEO broadly over the last sort of 12 months?

Yeah. Sweet. So as search marketers, owners of websites, we were all brought up, not brought up like as children of Google, brought up with this expectation that Google's going to give us free traffic.

Yeah.

10 blue links. If you rank up near the top, you're going to get a fairly high click-through rate from Google. Maybe like 37% of people on position 1 will click through to that first spot and you get a whole bunch of free traffic. And that's amazing. That's no longer the case. We're going to an effectively zero-click world where information and answers now showing up directly in answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Google now directly with AI mode. And the game has changed. It's no longer about attribution and looking at, you know, the traffic coming through to a website alone. It's very much about, you know, am I showing up at all and how am I showing up as a brand? So we're in a situation where suddenly we've been managing our own website and, you know, really the way that these answers are constructed is so complex and we're still all figuring it out, but it's really about a consensus of all this information on the web about your brand. It's ultimately coming into this answer, um, and, and determines how your brand is represented in these engines.

So just given that, what should we actually be optimizing for now?

Yeah, I think, um, I saw a study from SimilarWeb which was released a few days ago. If you have your brand mentioned, there's a strong chance that people actually go through and visit the website without them even clicking that reference in the answer.

Yeah.

So first and foremost, I think it's about showing up. That's critical. Uh, if you can get a citation, an actual link to your website, even better. But really for me, it's more about brand building and brand awareness and traditional brand metrics. It's, you know, is my brand showing up at all? How is it showing up? Ideally, if you are showing up as a brand, are you showing up towards the top of the pack? If there's like, you know, 5 options to choose from, are you the first in the list? I think that's really important. And, um, you know, when your brand does turn up, is it accurate information? Is it, you know, a positive representation of the brand? And, and I think that's the really the sort of thing that I'm thinking about when it comes to generative engine optimization, GEO. Yeah, um, because there is a few acronyms going out there— AEO, AIO, GEO.

And, um, talk me through each one of those.

They're all effectively the same thing. Like, you know, a broader bucket might be AI search. Yeah, where what we're seeing is basically traditional searches Still underpinning, you know, ultimately how these answers are, um, constructed is still a very important thing to pay attention to. But what's happening now is that, you know, these answer engines have 2 things that they're working on. That they've got the, the training data, which is, you know, kind of updated a few times a year. Um, it's built on literally books and databases of websites that have been crawled, and from that they construct an answer.

Yeah.

And then whenever it needs more recently updated answer, it goes to the web. And the web really is bringing in, you know, a whole bunch of websites that we wouldn't have seen as important in the past are literally determining whether or not your brand turns up and what's said about your brand. So this, this kind of model, as it's kind of doing its, its response, goes through a process of something called query fan-out.

Yes.

So you run a prompt, and then underpinning all that is like a series of other prompts that happen at the same time. So the example I've given is best family car for a family of 5 in New South Wales under $50,000. It will go through and literally start going, okay, for best, we need to bring in data from 2026 and not prior years. We need it to be, it's a family, so cargo space matters. If it's an electric vehicle, maybe they need to look at the range of the vehicle. So all these sub-prompts run and they all go and find references that are able to, I guess, just bring a consensus around an answer. And that all gets packaged together and determines what's said in the answer and the response you get. Whether it be ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, it's all the same system. And so you now have to start paying attention to Reddit, which is insane. It's like one of the biggest citation sources that Google and others are using. Review websites are now really critical. Trustpilot and Product Review in Australia is really important. And you can just have like the most random websites that aren't even websites you would even traffic, like visits that are now suddenly determining what's said about your brand. So it's this big fact-finding exercise, you know, pulling in all this data and trying to figure out, now that I know what's, I guess, determining what's being said about my brand and what websites are being used as part of that, you have to now develop quite an intricate strategy to figure out how am I going to respond on Reddit without getting banned or, you know, having the horde kind of come after me? Um, how do I improve the reviews of my website, um, on whatever review platform? And it's just a holistic strategy now that Probably requires different departments to what it needed in the past.

So it's almost like going backwards respectively and fixing up or adding in the information, right, to make sure that we show up properly.

100%. So yeah, I think that's a critical piece here is the information that's on these websites that's now determining what's said about your brand may not be accurate. It may not be correct. And it may not be up to date. So I think it starts with an audit going, okay, what's being said about my brand and which websites are determining what's being said. You can use various tools. There's Brand Radar, which has like an index of prompts. And what I mean by that is like they've kind of predetermined how people might already be using the answer engines to search about your brand. And there's platforms like Peek, PwC. They all have kind of slightly different approaches in how they're doing this. But essentially what it does is you load it up with prompts. Like in the past, we used keywords. So you get a keyword and it converts to a prompt. So if you had, say, using the Finder example, best home loans might have been a keyword that we really care for. It would now be something more like a phrase or a sentence like, what is the best home loan in Australia, June 2026?

Okay. Yeah.

And then that gets run through these answer engines. They scrape the responses and they list out all the websites that we used to determine the answer that was said. And then from that, you export that out. And start trying to, I guess, piece together a puzzle and a strategy to try and shift the narrative on your brand.

So given all of that, what are the best ways to increase the chance of actually being recommended, especially at the top of the list? Because we know it's so important, right?

Yeah, totally. So I'd say looking at the dataset first and foremost and identifying which domains are the important ones. As I said, Reddit is nearly turning up in every single, um, it's kind of wild.

I bet they're loving it. Yeah.

Well, I mean, they had a data deal with Google. I think it was something like $80 million a year or something like that. USD. Yeah. So very much so. And I think they're a listed stock and they had some pretty good response to that from investors. So yeah, I think figuring out the important domains and then figuring out how to directly shift each of them is actually quite different. So LinkedIn's also a top 5 source for You know, the various platforms. So that might look like, okay, you weren't posting in the past on LinkedIn. Now we need to start posting. How should we post? What's the structure of a post? Looking at competitors that maybe are already posting or other creators on LinkedIn. What's the format? How frequently are they posting? What was it about them that we think led to them getting included in an answer set? And developing playbooks by platform is really what we need to do.

Right.

And then I guess sequencing by platform, what's the most important? Which do we think we can impact the quickest and needs the most attention? It might be that something's factually incorrect. You might have a really poor rating on one of these review websites because it was only the angry customers that went along to do something.

Yeah.

And you just need a different playbook for each. And it does very much look like digital PR nowadays as well as a really critical lever. Finding out which websites are, I guess, referencing my brand in a list. If you're Going back to that best term example, in a prompt like, you know, what is the best home loan? What we're actually seeing is comparison websites are playing a massive role now for the various brands because you've got a list where if you're in a listicle and you're included as one of the great options to choose from, if there's consensus and a whole bunch of comparison websites are including your brand in that list, the large language models go, okay, cool, this is the correct answer. We're going to include that and include your brand in that list. Hopefully in an order that is reflective of what is truly best.

By number of mentions, like is it ranking you or is it?

It sometimes is a big factor, but often, I saw an example the other day where it's like 2 or 3 brands were referenced in the list. And then at the bottom it said, others worth noting are, and it listed 1, 2, 3. And some of them weren't actually brands that would be very popular, but I think they're in the dataset. And for completeness, the answer engine wants to include that. So I would say that when I look at this stuff, I always treat it as a variable. So just like traditional SEO, we used to look at this concept called domain authority. So the number of referring domains to your website, the number of effectively websites linking from their domain across to yours was important. And so I'd imagine that the volume of references is going to be important and playing into this. but it's not completely deterministic in the sense that it's going to absolutely lead to you getting that result. I really think it's about the accuracy, the trust of the domains that are making those references as well really makes a difference. And as I mentioned, the recency of some of those citations is also really critical. There's a brand I was studying recently that had a dispute with a government regulator and that came up a few months ago and that actually was appearing in the answers around a best term. It's like, you know, here's the, you know, the best product, but, you know, be mindful they recently had an issue with this regulator. Yeah, exactly. So this reputation piece is actually becoming a very important thing that a lot of companies are now paying attention to.

Which isn't a bad thing in my mind, right? Like good reputation, good brand, good recommendation. But yeah, I mean, that sounds like it's almost like a whole new search strategy from what we know from traditional SEO. How do we track whether or not we're showing up in the right places?

Yeah, so I would say that a lot of people are paying attention to ChatGPT, but Google still is the winner by far. And the fact that they now shifted from a traditional search box to literally it is like it's ChatGPT, that AI mode is effectively able to be an answer and you can kind of keep iterating on it and start replying to that as if it were a ChatGPT-like experience. So I'll say Google's still number one.

Yeah.

You need to track Google. You need to track AI Overviews, AI Mode, and traditional search. AI Overviews is kind of the lead-up to this whole moment where you'd have this answer block at the top of a search result and you could kind of click off to the website that had the reference. But now it's more dynamic and it's more like a ChatGPT-like experience.

It almost takes over the whole page now, doesn't it?

Literally, yeah. And I'd imagine at some point that's probably where it goes to. The URL bar's even changed in Chrome where it's effectively leading towards these chat experiences. So I think that's important to track. I do think with Claude, and it's really starting to take off, it's important to start looking at as well. A lot of the actual tracking tools don't yet have a Claude tracking solution, but there's a model in Claude called Haiku, which is the cheapest model. Because these prompts cost money to run, I'd say starting with a cheap model is probably enough. You don't need reasoning or advanced thinking when you're analyzing the responses. It's more just what's being said about my brand.

Right.

A cheap model like Haiku is good to track. I think Peak as a platform has that inside it, and they're all progressively adding them as well. But I think it's good to track a few versus just one or two because there's vast differences between what ChatGPT might reference and what Gemini or Claude might reference as well. So you need to really create a strategy that works for all of them, which is, it's hard, but it's necessary.

And you mentioned before, it's like having different teams for different stuff now. I guess selfishly, I want to know, like, what role do agencies now play?

I think that they're really critical. For me, what I would say is like in the room right now is, you know, maybe SEOs didn't have much of a voice in the past and now they do. So I think anyone doing SEO, really, really important because traditional SEO is one of the biggest and best things you can do to ensure success in, um, in a generative engine response. Um, making sure your site's crawlable and hitting all the technical pieces is really important. I'm still seeing a whole bunch of people blocking the bots for whatever reason. And I just don't think that's the right strategy. Maybe if you're a large news publisher, that's certainly a different strategic move, but for small businesses and so on, I don't think that's the right thing to do. So nailing the fundamentals with SEO is critical. Then now PR plays a massive role and especially digital PR, like getting those references online and across trusted brands and publications. The large language model draws consensus from those publications. So these listicles are driving a huge amount of the answers and responses. So say as an example, in e-com, if you were, um, you sold, I don't know, like a bag, a travel bag or something, suitcases. If there's like, you know, best suitcases for international travel and a whole bunch of websites had, you know, lists of all the brands that are, you know, best suitcases for international travel, you need to find out a way to get onto all those websites. And it may not look like just straight PR as well. It might look like affiliate programs or partnerships or speaking to these editors and giving them products to review. And It's about getting creative and bringing multiple different teams into the room. So digital PR is also very important. And then I think some of these things lived in the cracks before, but like in Finder, for example, I remember over so many years trying to bring up the importance of managing our reputation online. It's like, hey, is anybody looking at Trustpilot? And was it the PR team or the marketing team or somebody else?

Whose role is it?

Exactly. It's like it kind of was unclear. So this brand role now becomes important because it's not just Is my brand turning up, but what's being said about my brand? And I think that matters a lot because the copy you have on your website, the copy that's appearing on your partner's websites, all these things are now going to come into ultimately determining what's said, right? So it is this holistic strategy. It requires various seats at the table. And I think that agencies play a massive role because they're seeing what's happening not only for one brand, but what's happening across several brands at the same time.

Across different industries.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

So I think it's And you mentioned a few times now, like the term, like a trusted website. Is a trusted website just one that gets heaps of traffic or what determines it to be like more trusted than another?

We're still trying to figure that out. Some of these things I would say it's clear. You can see that there was well-read publications, strong journalistic standards. What's interesting is that these model providers don't yet have fully built out search indexes. Not like Google, that's been running for 20+ years. They're just starting to build out their own search index. So they're trying to figure out, okay, like they pretty much don't want to depend on Google anymore or Bing. OpenAI had a partnership with Bing and you'd see a strong correlation between if you performed well on Bing, you'd also perform well in OpenAI and ChatGPT. So really what's happening now is they're trying to build their own search indexes, their own search teams, and are crawling the web themselves. And so imagine if you're OpenAI and trying to build out this search team from scratch, there's a whole bunch of things that don't yet exist. Like you can probably spam these engines right now without getting picked up on with some of those tactics right at this point. And I think for me, as that evolves and as their engines evolve, more rules will come about and there'll be different ways of, I guess, getting things to work and not. But at this point it's quite nascent. It's early days.

Yeah. So what sort of questions should people be asking of their marketing teams or agencies to help set all this up for them? Because it's a whole new thing.

Yeah. So I think first and foremost, have we done a crawl of the website with all the bots? Can the bots see our website? You know, is there anything that's loading in JavaScript, you know, where there's something, you know, in rendering a webpage? So when it loads up on your screen, you can have something served client-side or server-side. Client-side rendering is where something like JavaScript is used to show the results on the screen, show the actual information. And a lot of the large language model crawlers can't actually read JavaScript. So if your information is showing in JavaScript, it won't be read and it won't be then turning up in the answers. So that's critical. Getting that technical foundation is the first piece. Then I think from there asking, okay, have we got prompt tracking in place? What are the prompts we're tracking? Is it something where we are looking for a cross-section of the business or is it about what's important to the organization and what because there's so many prompts to track. Yeah. And these tools are quite expensive, so you've got to be careful that you're not loading up with thousands of prompts. It's got to be, in my view, more of a cross-section. And, you know, looking at various service types, some reputational prompts, and, you know, trying to understand how your brand looks, looks versus competitors. So, you know, competitor A versus competitor B and seeing what turns up in an engine. Like, how does it justify one brand over another? What are the sources it's bringing in to come up with that answer? So yeah, I think that's really important.

So now that we're getting more answers from these LLMs and these generative AI tools, what should we be doing to stay top of mind?

To stay top of mind, I think the piece on digital PR really matters. I think that you need to build a PR program where you're constantly finding a way to get in the media. I always say that in order to get in the news, you need to do something new. That's how it works, right? So working backwards from that, one of the easiest things you can do is data-led PR. Data-led PR looks like commissioning some research, finding a way to get that research to produce an interesting headline that's going to be relevant to a publication that you're targeting. And I think if you can build out this kind of program where you might run 3 to 5 survey questions a month initially, you can really build a data-led PR engine that leads to huge amounts of success. And so I think that's the first thing. And to be top of mind as well, I think you've got to really look at what are the surface areas we're playing with here. Like if it's Reddit and someone's just mentioned your brand in the last 24 hours, and they've asked a question or they've kind of suggested something that's incorrect, you have a quick moment that you can literally jump on that and fix it and do it in such a way that's not self-promotion. And I think they'll respect that. And I think that if they can see that you're engaging the community without commercial gain as your kind of primary goal, it's really more really to ensure they've got support. I think that's really, really key. Um, so yeah, I think you need to set up these alerts and ensure that you can jump on these because Reddit threads you can comment on them, but some actually close after a period of time and then the information becomes crystallized, right?

It's training that you can't fix it, you can't change it, right?

So I think that's important. And then, yeah, what else would I say? I think that having your content strategy ensure that the things that aren't in your head about your brand are online. Like, I think there's this important concept with large language models where they're effectively in this battle to train on the world's information. They all are fighting to be building artificial general intelligence, AGI. And whoever wins, I guess, is the model that everybody ends up using, right? And so for me, it's like when I think about that, I think of the board-level metrics, like at OpenAI, Anthropic, what are they trying to encourage companies to do? And I think that they are all really trying to chase the world's information, get it ingested. I heard a stat the other day that they hopefully going— not hopefully, they're aiming or expecting that most of the world's information would actually be fully ingested and trained on in these large language models by 2028.

Crazy.

Which is insane, right? So given this concept of training and like kind of teaching these models, I think you need to give them something to learn when they come to your website, something new, information that they didn't have yet before, it wasn't yet public. So it's called information gain. How can I publish research, you know, publish stats, facts, You know, really specific information. So when the large language model crawler comes to my website, it's learned something new, it's hit its goal, and that information can then be represented in the answers around my brand when you're using ChatGPT and so on. So that's really the goal.

Great tips. Thank you. So talk to me what you think about the future marketing funnel. What does it actually look like knowing all of this?

Yeah, it depends how far down the line you look. I would say that what people don't realize at this point is that We obviously really want to make sure that our brands turn up well and whether they turn up at all, right? That's important. But what happens from here is that the main user of website becomes an AI agent. Literally, as you're using ChatGPT, prompts are running, it's visiting your website in the background. But I think actions will start being taken on your website by agents more than it will be by humans. And so really from here, it's about setting up your website to be agentically used. having some basics in place, like ensuring that it's got strong accessibility. So you're describing the things on the screen so an agent can kind of process that information quickly. It can take actions on behalf of the user, click around, use filters, use buttons, and so on. But I think it's about that. It's really, the funnel might look like us actually advertising to agents more than humans at some point.

Yeah.

But between now and then, I do really think it's about, and it's always been about this, about user engagement and having a strong experience. Really, with Google, they saw that Chrome's user behavior data was the biggest determinant of quality. So if they saw people getting the task done by visiting the website through Chrome, that they kind of went to the website, browsed through, got the information they wanted, and then transacted, that's a really strong signal. The worst signal you can send is going back to Google. You went to the website again. Yeah, exactly. Like this website said to have this information, it didn't. I've gone back to Google and I've gone to another website instead. to get the task done. So I think that what plays out from here is that the concept of agent experience, and that's going to be determined by probably the browser or kind of the native browser within these tools. Claude's got its desktop app, Codex and ChatGPT locally. There's Atlas, the browser. So they're going to start tracking user engagement and the experience that these agents have, how quickly it can get the information it wants, how quickly could it complete the task on behalf of the customer. These are all things that people are going to start talking about pretty soon.

Yeah, awesome. So people are now getting so used to using Claude for the exact product that, you know, even say me as a 30-year-old man in Western Sydney, how do you think that now plays into like a brand's content strategy?

Interesting. Yeah, so I think that the way a page presents information and options would be important in this case. So if you've got like, you know, color variants and, you know, information that's maybe locked away in a PDF or whatever, The way that information shows on a page really needs to be thought about. If it's in a dropdown menu, you can't guarantee that the agent can actually see that information and include it in an answer. So you might actually have to statically include it in a page and say, here are all the color ranges, here's the size ranges, here's whatever other sort of, I guess, directly specific information there is. Don't think that a large language model is going to make an assumption around what you can and can't do. So if you can make something that's custom or personal to somebody, like state that on the website. I think that information needs to be on there. And I think that's really a trick here is like—

Be specific.

Yeah, be specific and include the information. Don't assume that people are going to click through that information or a bot's going to do it either. You've got to make sure it's all on the page and easy to access and quickly as well.

So who's doing this really well so far that you've seen?

Yeah, I've seen some really good brands doing this stuff. So Lululemon is a great example, right? They do really well in generative engines. And the reason why is if you look at their product detail descriptions in Shopify, It literally leads with something like, great for yoga, and then it tells you about the product. But it's so specific. And normally you might have a really fluffy e-com description of like, really great material, blah, blah. I'm not good at this sort of stuff.

Diverse.

Yeah, whatever. Some stuff is just like, what does this even mean? Like brand talk sort of thing. But now it's like literally leading with, it's good for this. And so when people are in ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever, saying, I want the best yoga pants for whatever, it's got a great chance of showing up because all of its products now are quite specifically referenced and around what they're good for. So I think that's a really good point.

So they kind of ahead of the curve or they've deliberately done that or?

They've deliberately done that. Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, it's a specific strategy they've done and it's working really, really well for them.

Awesome. So with more of this AI-generated content written this way, are we all going to become kind of the same or how do we still separate ourselves differently?

Yeah. Well, my view on this is that, um, Look, ChatGPT, whatever Claude use, you know, whatever AI use, it writes really well, but we need to start assuming it's a 1 out of 10 in terms of content quality. And what I mean by that is like, if you can write well, that's— everyone you know has access to the same tool. Yeah. So how do we differentiate?

Yeah.

What information do we need to start including to make sure that our page is by far better? You know, do we need to add video? Do we need to add unique and referenceable information that is based on proprietary research? Is there a quote, a testimonial, you know, better FAQs, like things that I guess just require more effort. I often think about, you know, doing the hard things scalably.

Yes.

So, okay, if we need to get research, how do we do that? How do we make it efficient to get the research? How do we make it efficient to add to our pages? I think that's the opportunity that AI presents, and it's really where brands need to focus.

What other mistakes are marketers kind of making at the moment that you've seen?

Yeah, well, I think At the moment, people aren't prioritising this stuff. A whole bunch aren't, and they're kind of assuming that the old playbook's going to work.

Is it more head in the sand kind of stuff, or I just don't know?

I think it's both. I think that people are trying to use their traditional measurement frameworks and go, okay, where's my traffic at? I've got less clicks, so I'm going to deprioritise this channel like SEO because it's no longer important. I think that's the craziest thing that people are doing right now. It's like SEO is more important than ever. It underpins your geo performance. How you turn up in ChatGPT is largely determined by, well, at least initially, how well you turn up in traditional search. It's still so critical. So don't cut those SEO budgets. Don't cut the SEO priorities or the SEO team members. If anything, add a few, right? It's quite critical.

Sounds like you need a whole bunch more.

Well, yeah. And I think that with various skill sets, it's not just about technical SEO. I think that's really, really important. It's more about how can I research this topic? present information in a way on a page that's unique that when a large language model crawls the website, it's gaining the information. It can credit me for that information and hopefully present my brand more positively in the answers that it responds with.

Yeah. So if you were starting a new brand today, where would your sort of focus be?

I would, I mean, it depends how much budget you've got, but I would try and build outwards from social platforms. So I really like the idea that You don't have to wait 2 years for strong SEO results. Reddit can get you a page 1 reference straight away. Even if it's not through a generative engine response, you actually have the new discussions and forum section on page 1 of Google. So I think Reddit's like straight ticket to the dance day 1. LinkedIn is surprisingly easy to do well. So that matters. I would start with strong PR as well, trying to figure out how can I build relationships with the publications that matter? What does it take to be referenced by these publications? And how's that whole world work? And really hijacking other big brands that are determining what's being said. If it's in comparison and you're comparing financial products, the comparison websites, I think it's like 30-odd percent of the actual citations are from comparison websites at this point. It doesn't matter if it's insurance or finance or whatever, they're literally determining what's being said. So really, really critical. I think there's early responses on whether it be like reviews on Google My Business or Trustpilot product review, building that base up with happy customers is really important before it's too late. And you're kind of just got the angry customers trying to find like where to put negative reviews online. But these really tactical foundations I think matter. And just making sure they have the strong foundations on a website that you've done the research, you can think of all the angles and how people might research your product and service. And then you reflect that in your content strategy, direct and specific information. that's really useful and genuinely answers the question is important.

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100%.

Yeah. And then also making sure that I'm, I've got a PR strategy. Like for example, I'll use myself as an example. We commissioned a PR agency. Their KPI is 2 articles per month. They're not in the review style at the moment. They're more just us putting comment to different things happening in media or For example, we write one about end of financial year. Is that still the right approach or is it a bit deeper than that now?

Well, yeah, definitely. I think looking at the types of PR that's getting picked up matters. And some people say, no, there's no such thing as bad PR. I'm more of the camp of like, that's actually not true nowadays because your bad PR, you can't get rid of it. So yeah, I'd say really targeting the right publications and just reverse engineering the goal, right? If you need to be on a listicle, If you want to be having a write-up around your brand and figuring out a strategy that gets that outcome is really, really important. I think the piece on reviews as well, just go back to that for a sec, is if you've already gotten someone to give you a 5-star review on one platform, how can you get them to do another review somewhere else? And I think that's really, really powerful. If you look at the Finder website right now, if people give us a positive review, we encourage them to review us elsewhere. And I think that's a really powerful strategy.

Yeah, that's awesome. I think Yeah, as I said, for a lot of the franchise and retail brands we've got, we prioritize Google, but we know that there are so many other places that they can put reviews. And I think that's including things like the email marketing that goes out and incentivizing that a little bit too.

Yeah, totally. I saw something the other day actually. There was a website, there's an agency, and in the footer of their website, they did an experiment where they changed, it said proudly made in Philadelphia originally. They changed it to be like serving 137 clients with like a 72% retention rate or something like that. And it actually directly showed up in the ChatGPT responses. It changed what was said about their brand because it was in the footer of the website across hundreds of pages. They just took it as like, that's what this agency does. Exactly verbatim. And it's a really powerful tactic.

Awesome. I want to do something fun right now. I want to do like a live kind of like search on the LLMs for like a pizza place around here.

Oh, cool.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to search on Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini and see what the results are, how they come up differently. Interesting. So let's start with Claude. So I've searched best pizza place around here. Um, and you can see on my phone, we've got Il Pacifico Pizza, Vico Italian Eatery, and then Bloom Potts Point. We've got 3 there. So now let's go to Gemini. I did the same thing. I said best pizza place near me. It's given me Il Pacifico. So they've done well being number, number 1 there again. Yep. Sienna Marina. So a different pizza place. And then the third one's different again. Pizza Boccone, Potts Point.

Interesting.

So now let's try ChatGPT, the last one. Let's see how they've gone. Okay. So they've actually given me a map as well at the top there. Cool. But, um, Il Pacifico wins again. So they must have like a really good strategy somehow. I don't know how the other pizza place has done it. Uh, then they've also broken it down into different categories. So he's got. Best traditional, best Neapolitan, best local hidden gem, best old school, as opposed to 1, 2, 3. So I'm keen to get your take on why the answers differ a little bit or how the number 1 placement's kept it across all 3.

Well, yeah, I mean, I'd have to look at it in more detail, but I think for me, is that link on there directly to their website and that kind of Il Pacifico?

This one here?

Yeah. What's that first black dot in the Australian Good Food Guide is the first link to come up there.

Yeah.

That's something you should pay attention to. Yeah. I'm not sure what that actually is a guide about, but it might be like a profile on that restaurant or a review or they would include it in a list.

That's like a review site. So I'm assuming now that you said that they obviously have got someone to come and eat at the restaurant and review it, and then they've been listed across a few different review places.

Yeah, exactly. So for a restaurant, I think that's a killer playbook, right? Is invite them in, get a positive review on their platform. That all really matters. And it's interesting to look at the data as well because I saw some data this morning where Facebook videos were actually being pulled in for brands.

Right.

Okay. Where someone's like, best pizza in whatever, that wasn't the example, but best pizza in Piedmont, say. And if someone's put up a video and it's on a Facebook page for Piedmont locals, that's a really good and strong citation. So I think really what I'd do in this case is grab those prompts, put them into a tool like Peek or Brand Radar. They often have a free trial. You can go through and check it out. And you can export the URLs out and see what's being included, right? And go, okay, cool, like these are the, the publications that are being referenced. I'm gonna go reach out to them all.

I need to get on there.

Get on there, literally.

Um, so it's almost like a good way, like if you're not showing up there at the moment, the best way to start is to do that, right?

Literally, that is the most tactical thing you can do. And then also look at not just am I turning up, but what's being said about my brand. Yeah. And is it something that's on my website that's being said? Is it from the about page that I looked at once when I built the website? Now it's suddenly really critical, right? So Rewrite that section. It might be like from a particular region or whatever, like, and you haven't said it before online. There's like that specific and direct information is important to include. Yeah, so I think that's the opportunity.

Awesome. I want to move on to a section we call The Effing Truth, which is kind of just like a fast rapid-fire question round.

Let's do it.

The one AI tool you can't live without?

Claude Code.

Yep. Okay. How are you using it?

For everything. Like literally, I do not start a task unless From Claude Code outwards. I've got all my tools connected, all my data connected. I use it for analysis, for planning, for building agents.

It's amazing. Phenomenal. Yeah. The one thing you actually need to scale to $100 million.

Persistence.

Determination.

Yeah, determination, naivety.

I don't know.

I think it's just like a flywheel actually is the answer. You need a flywheel, something you can do repeatedly that produces an expected result. And if you spin it faster, for me in SEO, it looked like publish a page, get links to it, Promote it with PR, run ads of that page and just do that continuously. Find a new keyword, do another page. And we built out this massive, massive business off the back of that. Literal flywheel. That was the flywheel that drove our growth.

Yeah. Amazing. The one skill that's a waste of time to learn today.

I wouldn't say complete waste of time, but I'm probably not going to do a programming course. You literally can have an engineer in your pocket now with Claude Code, Codex. cursor. I think it's more about learning about prompting and learning about how to give context to AI versus learning how to code. That's my personal view.

Correct. The one AI tool that's really overhyped right now. Hmm.

An overhyped AI tool. I hate to say it, but I think Claude sometimes is a little bit overhyped because it got so much attention really quickly. People just disregarded everything else. But if you go back and you look at ChatGPT, Its image generation model right now is market leading. If you go to some of the stuff that Codex is releasing, and especially over the next week or two, it's market leading. Anthropic's done awesome work, but I feel like at this point you need to have a few kind of tools in your arsenal. It's not about all in on one. So yeah, for me, Claude's fantastic, but there are other tools out there that can do some things better.

Yeah, correct. The one piece of advice you give to marketers today.

I would say it's probably not a time to chill and not be upskilling. It is about the opposite. You need to create time and space literally every day. I'd say a minimum of 30 minutes for 30 days. Figure out that thing, whether it be GEO, AI agents, how to use Claude properly. This time right now is critical. It's going to determine, in my view, success or failure in your career over the next 12 to 18 months.

I want to talk to you about how you're using AI. Talk us through some of the tasks that it does for you on a daily basis.

Yeah, so I start my day with an inbox sweep. So I look for emails that need a response and literally my AI will look at them, draft a response on my behalf, pulling in information from various sources, whether it be transcripts from my Google Drive or other context that I've given it. And I can go through and just edit it and send. So that's important. I also use it for meeting preparation. So if I'm going into a meeting, it'll tell me, who I'm meeting with, significant facts about them or information that I need. So it just really speeds up that. I use it for document creation and I say that it sounds simple, but I use it in a very interesting way. I'm connecting a lot of data sources and a lot of tools and ultimately the document's the end output, but it's more the way I build a document nowadays is imagine being able to copy paste a million things into a document in the space of minutes. That's really what you can do. And connecting these APIs and data sources, there's something called an MCP. So an MCP is like Model Context Protocol. So it got released, I think, March last year by Anthropic.

Okay.

So basically a way to get access to a database or information inside a tool that you have a subscription to. Like for me, I use Ahrefs, which has SEO data inside it, grabs that information and can pull that into an analysis that I'm doing to help me produce a document really quickly. So bringing in those connectors and MCPs, I think, to create documents saves a huge amount of time and improves the quality of analysis and I guess reports that I may produce. And then I use it for reminding me who I'm accidentally ghosting.

Literally.

Who I haven't replied to. Yeah, I created this little app called Ghostbuster. That's so cool. You haven't replied to this person for 3 days and it's like, oh geez. And so I've got my WhatsApp connected so it can draft a message and get me to send it.

I think a lot of people need that.

Oh man. The coolest thing I did was connect WhatsApp to my Claude code.

I have not done that yet.

I mean, it's not for everyone because there's maybe some risk in doing that, but you can synthesize WhatsApp chat groups. My wife's business has basically 7 or 8 WhatsApp groups and I literally pulled all the chats. I think it was about 7 or 8,000 of them, produced an operating manual for her business in about 20 minutes.

Wow.

Insane. And it's so specific. It's not like a general thing. It literally pulls out direct and specific information. And yeah, it's pretty cool.

That's insane. What's been like the absolute biggest unlock for you with AI?

Well, I think I mentioned Claude Code before. The fact that I can build whatever I want to at this point without having to speak to an engineer is the most remarkable thing. I literally just have to imagine it, describe it with natural language, and it can be built. And I think that's the opportunity right now that A lot of people are looking at Claude using Cowork maybe, but not many using Claude Code. And I think Claude Code is the most magical tool. You literally, when connected with various APIs, you can go and build a website, design a website, connect it up with Stripe payments. All these things would've taken so much time to do. I literally did this last night for a website in 20 minutes.

Yeah.

Built a landing page, connected up a Stripe account, built a form that pushed into a Notion database. It is so fast to do. So for me, I think people need to learn Claude Code. If you're not learning Claude Code and you've got ChatGPT, download Codex. They're both as good as each other. It's like, well, close enough. And just get coding because I think it's possible. Yeah, literally.

How do you think AI is going to change marketing teams tomorrow?

It's a good question. I think the way I think about teams is I'm not the sort of person that's like, let's go with less people. I'm more like, how can we get to our team doing more and raising the ambition? And so upskilling them, giving them capability, giving them runway to test and innovate is very, very important right now. I think we can't always expect people to do this stuff in their spare time.

No, you've got to train.

Exactly. And so giving time and space and making it culturally normal to innovate, really going through identifying opportunities to test with AI and do things that I guess historically might've been impossible to do or challenging to do at least. You don't need huge amounts of budget anymore. You just need persistence. Like, you know, you need to put in that prompt and, you know, keep refining it, giving it feedback until you get to the result. And you'd be surprised what you can do in a few hours.

Like, normalize it within the workspace, right?

Yeah, legit.

Yeah, people make mistakes, try it out.

Yeah, that's the opportunity.

I feel like today we've, we've got a pretty good in-depth sort of understanding of it. I've learned a lot. But how do people stay up to date with this? Like, what is the best way to keep— you know, AI changes every week. How do we keep up with it?

Look, I think There's a lot of AI creators out there. I'm certainly putting out a bunch of content on my Instagram, so that's helpful. You hopefully don't have to comment to get access to all of them. That's the most annoying thing.

I know. And LinkedIn, Instagram, it's like, I don't want to comment that.

I know, right? So I think I put a LinkedIn post out lately, recently. It was like 17 guides without having to comment. So you can check that one out.

That's a good idea.

Yeah. And if you're an executive or a founder, I built something called Executive Arc and basically a group where we catch up once a week and we're sharing playbooks, sharing from pretty cool speakers, people that are either founder level or running functions inside businesses. It's designed to be just a practical playbook, a practical network that you can learn from.

Awesome. So you mentioned your Instagram. Let's let everyone know where they can find you.

I actually don't. I think my Instagram handle is Jeremy Jacob Ryle. Yeah, it is Jeremy Jacob Ryle.

We'll put it in the show notes anyway.

Yeah, exactly. I only really went From private to public, probably, I don't know, about 6 months ago. And I'm about to crack 10K followers. So yeah, it's doing pretty good. LinkedIn, you can find me, Jeremy Cabral. I've got jeremycabral.com, my website for growth advisory inquiries. And yeah, that's me.

Awesome. Thank you so much for today.

Likewise. Thank you.