Beyond SEO: Understanding Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Emily Page (00:00):

Before we get into today's episode, imagine walking into a place you've been a thousand times before the shelves are stocked, the lights hum overhead. The pop music gently nudges you forward and everything feels familiar until you notice something. You can't explain what you're about to hear. Sounds like it belongs in the Twilight Zone, but it is closer to the reality of public relations than you might think.

Doug Downs (00:38):

You walk into a grocery store late in the evening, it's quiet, too quiet. You notice the aisles are laid out exactly as you remember, but something feels off. The produce section is pristine. Every apple, polished every tomato perfectly round. The canned goods are stacked with military precision. It's beautiful but strange. No shoppers, no staff, just silence and symmetry. And then you see the sign entrance for humans Odd, but you keep walking past the bread aisle. You notice a door you've never seen before. A smaller sign reads entrance for bots. Well, curiosity gets the better of you. You step through the fluorescent hum deepens the air feels cooler, and suddenly you are in another grocery store. The shelves here are different. No colorful displays, no end cap promotions. Everything is labeled with stark, almost clinical descriptions here. Nothing is designed for humans. The cans are stacked not for beauty, but for accessibility.

(02:02):

The labels are stripped of flare, leaving only keywords, data points and codes. There's no pop music playing from the speakers. No fresh sense even in the bakery. It's not for you, it's for something else. And as you stand in the strange stillness, you realize what's happening. One store is meant for people appealing to sound, sight, and smell. The other is meant for machines organized to be scanned, parsed, and understood by algorithms. And while the human store looks familiar, it's the machine's store that decides what ends up in your basket. Today on stories and strategies, we step through the second door, the one built for bots. In this episode, we explore the strange new aisles of AI search from dual websites to the hidden shelves of check GPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Because in PRS Twilight Zone, the real audience might not be human at all and the bots are hungry. My name is Doug Downs

Farzana Baduel (03:31):

And my name is Farzana Baduel. Our guest this week is Jackson Wightman joining all the way from Montreal. Hi Jackson.

Jackson Wightman (03:39):

Hi. Thank you for having me on.

Farzana Baduel (03:41):

How are things in lovely Montreal? It's such a beautiful place.

Jackson Wightman (03:45):

Yeah, it's summer in Montreal, but we're just coming out of one of those East coast heat waves, so we are now getting a respite and it is a beautiful respite. Very, very gorgeous day here today.

Farzana Baduel (03:56):

Now Jackson, you are the founder of Proper Propaganda, a boutique public relations agency that helps innovative tech and lifestyle businesses. Brands in North America amplify their stories and drive real business results. You are the author of the Tech PR Playbook, an Industry Guide and Blending Storytelling and Strategy to Influence Press Build Reputation and Scale Influence. You are also known, and I love this as the Minister of Propaganda, a title you embrace on LinkedIn where you share bold insights from AI search tactics to challenging traditional RFP practices with clarity and wit. Thank you, minister.

Doug Downs (04:40):

Thank you. That was a wonderful introduction. Maybe the best I would frame it. Well, we searched right? We searched it, the search came up well. So Jackson, most of us, when we search things, it's a verb. Now we Google things, right?

(04:55):

And I know from talking to you, 80% of search engine traffic is Google. We still go to Google four out of five times another 10%. We go to Bing. Those are the renegades out there. They don't Google, they bing something. But increasingly people are using generative ai. We're chat GP ting searches and that's building the writing is on the wall. As PR pros, we need to realize we need to win the searches for our clients. We need to realize that search engine optimization is giving way to what's being called answer engine optimization. And we need to build strategies, not theory strategies. And one of your strategies is dual websites, one for humans, one for the bots. What does that look like?

Jackson Wightman (05:49):

It's a great question and thank you for asking it. A few things. I think you alluded to the fact at the beginning that Google's Blue Link business is still a great business and it still matters for a lot of companies and it's probably going to matter for a while, but more and more we are seeing people search as you alluded to with generative engines for questions, a range of questions, any question you can think of. And when they do that, generative engines send out this army of bots called rag bots. And rag bots have very specific kind of likes and dislikes and things. I don't want to make 'em sound like they have personality because they don't, but they're very specific in how they like things organized, information organized. And I think what we're heading towards is a dual universe. There will be a websites for humans that's pretty and has nice colors and fonts and all the things that we all know.

(06:40):

And then one for bots where information is organized and optimized for their consumption. Why do I think this is happening already? 51% of all internet traffic is bot traffic. So already the bots are consuming content. We know they can consume content at school far beyond the ability of any human. So they are effectively now, in our view at least, and in the view of some of our clients, there are effectively a whole other ICP that any business should treat like an ICP. And obviously one of the ways you cater to an ICP is through a website. Well, these bots need very specific things from a website. So you may have a second site, you may have a section within a site for them. That's what we think the world is heading towards.

Farzana Baduel (07:26):

Jackson what is an ICP

Jackson Wightman (07:29):

Ideal customer profile. I'm so sorry.

Farzana Baduel (07:31):

Ah, okay. Okay. Love these acronyms. Always looking to collect more. Now

Jackson Wightman (07:37):

PR man, just colour me bad on that one. I felt my clients that, but I do. I fault victim.

Farzana Baduel (07:46):

Now I remember back in the day when social media was emerging and people had this sort of sense of here's a content, we're just going to shove it on all the different social media channels, be it LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram. Well back then it was Twitter and then people started realizing that actually they are attracting different audiences and they have different algorithms and we need to have different channel strategies as they started to grow in their understanding. Do you think the same thing's going to happen with these sort of LLMs like chat, GBT, Gemini perplexity that we're going to start treating it, treating them as distinct media channels in the sense that we're going to look at actually different audiences favor different things and audiences use them for different aspects of their search and most importantly, looking at where do they scrape from?

Jackson Wightman (08:39):

It is an excellent question and I want to preface my answer by saying this is a new realm. Obviously as we all know and like any new realm, we have to be careful what is true today might not be true in a month, might not be true in six months for sure. So what I would say is absolutely you are correct Farzana. The channels are different. So when we look at what these big AI engines are scraping as citation material, what they're sourcing from when they produce an answer, what Google is doing is different than what Jet GPT is doing is different than what Perplexity is doing. And this is why aggregate data, MuckRack who most of your listeners would know, MuckRack just put out a really cool report about what AI is reading. It's a great starting point for anybody thinking about getting started in this realm.

(09:29):

And I think most PR agencies should think about it because it intersects so much with the work of traditional pr. But rack's data was aggregate data. So rack's looking at entire categories, it's looking at big, big data sets and it's saying, okay, Wikipedia matters to chat GPT or YouTube matters to Google, Reddit matters to perplexity. All of those things are true. But when you go to design a program, a PR program that's going to help a client optimize their position in AI search, you have to get granular. So when Rack came out with its data, we actually were doing some work with a tool called Scrunch, which is sort of an AI monitoring tool. And our data for individual clients in terms of what was being scraped when AI talked about them was quite different than what MuckRack was sharing in its report in aggregate.

(10:27):

Does it mean rack was wrong? Absolutely not. It's sharing aggregate data. Aggregate data as we all know in our careers is a starting point to strategy building. But what we've seen, at least in terms of AI engine optimization is, as you alluded to, each engine seems to prefer different sites. But you have to go, when you're looking at doing this kind of work for a client, you have to go very granular because what your client or what their category, what AI may be scraping from there is going to be different than what the aggregate data is saying. And I think that's really, really important and it's a lesson that we just learned through doing a little bit for a few of our clients. We're a consumer tech agency, so our clients, some of them are kind of up on this stuff I would say. But yeah, you have to look at the engines individually and you have to look at the sources, different aggregate versus

Doug Downs (11:21):

Client. Could you walk through again, I think you mentioned 'em real fast. Just for me, what does chat GPT scrape? What does code scrape and the other AI tools, what do they scrape? Gemini as well, obviously Gemini scrapes. Google I would assume.

Jackson Wightman (11:38):

I mean I'll start with Gemini because Gemini is kind of an easy one. Google likes, Gemini seems to to scrape YouTube. YouTube is obviously

Doug Downs (11:45):

It's Google. Yeah, it's all Alphabet.

Jackson Wightman (11:47):

Yeah, it's all in the family. They like to keep it in the family. Google also seems to to scrape, so Gemini likes to scrape Reddit as does perplexity. Perplexity also likes YouTube and Reddit chat. GPT seems to like Wikipedia. So when we're optimizing for chat GPT presence, we're thinking about Wikipedia, we're thinking about how we can manage there. Chat G doesn't seem to care as much in most instances about YouTube and Reddit. It cares seemingly. And again, our experiences is our experience. It may not be other people's experience, but it does seem to care more about mainstream media outlets. So again, we're tech chat, GT scraping Toms a lot. It's scraping tech radar a lot. Claude is another beast. We haven't really done a lot of Claude because most of our clients aren't overly concerned about it. Same for meta.

Farzana Baduel (12:37):

So my mind is just going, just blowing up thinking, grew up with a couple of broadcast channels, a couple of sort of print media, and then you've got legacy media or traditional media. Then you've got all these social media channels and now US prs have to think, right? Perplexity and Chacho, VT and Gemini and God knows what else is going to come up. And then not only do we have to think about all of them as separate channels, but also what you just mentioned about what each of these LLMs scrape, I'm sure that's not going to just be set in stone. They're going to be constantly changing.

Jackson Wightman (13:13):

So it's another great question and I appreciate it. I think at the end of the day, PR is and has always been about being in managing the spaces and places and messages where reputation shows up. And this is just more of the same. The other thing I think about PR people that's really interesting is, and I'm sure I'm speaking to the choir here a little bit, but we are as an industry, very adaptive. We have been through monumental shifts in our career, and I don't want to guess anyone's age, but I have lived through the shift from, I had to live through mobile, I had to live through social media, I had to live through early internet, and that's all in one career. Now I have ai, so like many of us, I think of it myself as an adaptive person. And at the end of the day we have that baked into our DNA I think as an industry and as a discipline and as PR people,

Doug Downs (14:13):

There are a lot of lawsuits or talks of lawsuits with all this scraping going on, especially journalist outlets, newspapers, news websites. They don't want their stuff just being used in a search and they can't drive any revenue from it. So sometimes they put their content behind a paywall, which may or may not work if they put it behind a paywall. Does that mean that the search, the Chat GPT can't find it and scrape it? How does that work and is it worth doing?

Jackson Wightman (14:45):

Sure. And I want to, again, I'll preface it by saying I'm not a technical person, but it's a question we've talked a lot about internally at our agency and with some of our clients who are further along, I'll say in terms of their view and aptitude for this generative engine optimization. From what we can tell, sometimes some AI bots have the ability to pass off as humans. Sometimes they have the ability even to get past paywalls. Does that mean that they often do? No, our opinion is no. They do not often do that. It gets very tricky. So, and various tools are able to sort of say, are you a bot or are you a human? Some bots have found a way past that moment and it's going to get very interesting as sort of Perplexities Comet and Chachi PT agent and these agents that are effectively acting on behalf of humans.

(15:36):

How do we treat those bots? Because they're an agent of Jackson, they're an agent of Farzana, they're an agent of Doug, so maybe they should like humans. At the end of the day, there's going to be, and there is, I think undergoing the media industry is undergoing a reckoning. It has to get paid and it's in everybody's interest that it continues to exist. AI needs good journalism to scrape from, and the AI companies need the media companies to exist. So what we've started to see is that there are indeed a range of deals that are made. I think Amazon even made one with the New York Times recently, if I remember the news. What we're also seeing is the rise of pay per scrape tool. So there's a tool called Tobit. It's a very interesting model. It pays media companies for each scrape that its bots make up a website in an answer. And of course those fees are not massive fees, but at the scale that this is now happening, that can add up to a lot. So there is a mutual interest. I think at the end of the day, people are going to want, media, companies are going to want to be scraped by ai, and AI is going to want to have good things to scrap proper journalism and not just a bunch of direct and corporate crap.

Doug Downs (16:50):

Really appreciate your time today, Jackson. Completely eyeopening. That was great to

Farzana Baduel (16:54):

Thank you. Now in our last episode, Jackson, before you escape our guest, Heather Blundell, she Left a question for you.

Heather Blundell (17:01):

Okay. So the question I would like to leave for your next guest, your lucky next guest. How can we design workplaces that not only retain people through life's messier, more human moments, but actually see those moments as sources of strength?

Jackson Wightman (17:19):

It's a great question and I'm going to give an answer that will begin probably sounding a bit cliched. I think we have to lead with empathy. I came up and some other people listening to this came up in an environment where you were just told to get back in there and tough it out. That is not a productive way to lead an organization. An organization needs empathy imbued through it. And I know we hear this a lot these days, but I keep coming up against companies, particularly in the technology space that are not empathetic. That's not part of the culture. The culture is get the hell back in there and play the rest of the game, which is terrible. So understanding that people are human is the first thing at the end of the day. Resilience in work, to me is very similar to resilience in personal life. And I think recognizing that and finding ways to harness that, recognizing that somebody who has maybe their relationship is breaking up or something about that. The strength that is built from that is the same thing. It's the strength that's built from you worked on a pitch for 20 hours and you didn't win. So resilience is, resilience is resilience, I think. And maybe a little more realization around that will help organizations be more empathetic and more humane and understand the value to their business of doing so.

Doug Downs (18:39):

Yeah. Yep. Long term. True. Your turn. Jackson, what question would you like to leave behind for the next guest?

Jackson Wightman (18:46):

I'm going to leave a question that gets at a problem I'm having. So we work primarily with clients from cultures that are not our own. I like you Doug, am Canadian. We have very specific ways of being. Many of our clients are coming from Asia, they're coming from the Middle East, they're coming from Europe. These are different business cultures, different contextual cultures. Some of them are higher context cultures, some of them are more direct. I'm just interested in understanding what steps other agency owners or other prs have taken when they are selling into cultures that are not their own. So is there a playbook? Is there best practices to inculcate cultural understanding across the team, but particularly with your sales team who are going to be the tip of this spear?

Doug Downs (19:34):

Wow. I have to look up the word inculcate first before I respond.

Farzana Baduel (19:41):

Texan, could you give us a little bit of context around high context cultures and low context cultures?

Jackson Wightman (19:48):

Sure. High context cultures are cultures, and I'll use some examples, the Japanese or the Chinese, where often things are not said low context cultures. The one I always think of because I lived part of the year in Aruba. The Dutch are a very low context culture. Israelis are a very low context culture. You say things directly, you do not leave anything to chance. You say the words, which sometimes for nice little polite Canadians can be hard because we don't like our culture. Always say things. We say, oh yeah, that's great and we don't mean it's great at all. We mean it's fricking terrible. So that's the difference between a high context and low context, high context. Things are not said, but maybe they're said with body language or maybe they're said by not being said. Low context is super, super direct.

Doug Downs (20:37):

Thanks again Jackson.

Farzana Baduel (20:38):

Thank you so much.

Jackson Wightman (20:39):

Thank you.

Farzana Baduel (20:41):

So Doug, here are the top three things that we got from the minister of Propaganda, Jackson Wightman today. So number one, dual website strategy. Businesses should consider separate versions of their websites. One designed for us mere mortals, human users, and one optimized for AI bots. Since bots now represent a major share of internet traffic, that kind of makes sense.

Doug Downs (21:10):

It scares me a little, but yeah, it does.

Farzana Baduel (21:13):

Now, number two, engine specific optimization. So he discussed different AI platforms, so we're talking Gemini perplexity chat, g bt that they scrape content from different sources. So PR pros must tailor strategies to each engine rather than relying only on broad aggregate data.

Doug Downs (21:35):

This too makes complete sense and I just hadn't thought about it before.

Farzana Baduel (21:39):

And so that leads us on the third and final insight. Prs new value in AI search. Generative AI creates a fresh opportunity for PR to improve measurable impact, hallelujah, by influencing how clients appear in AI generated answers across platforms.

Doug Downs (22:03):

So he's a glass is half full kind of guy on these changes that are coming. I kind of shared that, but I get there's some doom and gloom. I got lots of friends who are writers and they're looking for work, right? And scared as hell right now.

Farzana Baduel (22:16):

But I guess this will really help some. I think with new technologies it's always about some benefit and you have the winners and the losers and ultimately the winners are those with a winning mindset of learn. Look for the opportunities and don't freeze. If you see a gray rhino of change coming towards you, you've just got to adapt. You've got to see the opportunity. And I think that's what that he was Jackson, he came in with. These are the opportunities we need to look for. Let's not just sit and wait for them to just take the content generational piece. Where are the opportunities? Let's launch new services like ask optimization. Let's figure this out. Let's get into the car for the ride. Love it,

Doug Downs (22:59):

Adapt or die. That's where we're going. If you'd like to send a message to our guest, Jackson Wightman, we've got his contact information in the show notes. Stories and strategies is a co-production of Curzon Public Relations, JGR Communications and Stories and Strategies, podcasts. If you like this episode, please leave a rating, possibly a review doesn't actually help the algorithm. It stands out to humanize and more people check the podcast out. Thank you to our producers, David Olijade and Emily Page. And lastly, do us a favor forward this episode to one friend, not a bot, a friend. Thanks for listening.