The Homepage Is No Longer the Front Door: Leah Nurik on Al Visibility, GEO, & the Future of Brand Discovery

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For more than two decades, digital marketing revolved around a familiar goal: get people to your website. Rank higher. Earn the click. Drive the traffic. Convert the visitor. But what happens when the customer never makes it to your homepage?

As consumers increasingly turn to ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and other AI-powered experiences to research products, vendors, and brands, the rules of discovery are being rewritten. Increasingly, AI is deciding which companies get mentioned, how they’re described, which sources are trusted—and which brands get recommended at all.

In this episode of Signal & Noise, hosts Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Leah Nurik, CEO and Co-Founder of Brandi AI, to explore the rapidly emerging world of AI Visibility and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

Leah argues that this isn’t simply another evolution of SEO. It represents a fundamental shift from a web organized around keywords, rankings, links, and clicks toward one organized around meaning, context, authority, credibility, and narrative.

The conversation breaks down the increasingly confusing landscape of SEO, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and GEO—and why traditional SEO isn’t disappearing. Instead, Leah sees SEO increasingly becoming one component of a broader AI visibility strategy.

But being mentioned by AI isn’t enough. One of Leah’s most important points is that marketers need to understand the sentiment and narrative surrounding their brands inside AI-generated answers. Is the brand being represented accurately? Positively? What competitors appear alongside it? What sources are shaping the story?

The discussion also explores one of the biggest unintended consequences of AI-powered discovery: the future of publishers and the open web. If answer engines increasingly satisfy users without sending them to the original source, what happens to referral traffic, publisher economics, and the value exchange that has supported the web for decades?

And paradoxically, AI may make some traditional marketing disciplines more important, not less. Leah makes the case that earned media and PR are poised for a resurgence because authoritative third-party sources can influence how AI systems understand and describe brands. In her view, trying to “game” AI algorithms misses the bigger opportunity: building genuine authority, credibility, and a coherent brand narrative.

The conversation ultimately raises a bigger question for marketers: Are we moving from an era of earning the click to an era of earning the recommendation?

If so, the homepage may no longer be the front door to your brand. AI might be.

In this episode:

• Why AI-powered discovery represents a fundamental change to search

• SEO vs. AEO vs. GEO—and why the distinctions matter

• How AI systems understand and represent brands

• Why mentions, citations, sentiment, and narrative are becoming critical marketing metrics

• Why traditional SEO still matters in an AI-first world

• The surprising resurgence of PR and earned media

• Why brands shouldn’t try to “game” AI

• How AI search could reshape publisher economics and the open web

• Why marketing teams may need to reorganize around AI visibility

• What CMOs should be doing now to prepare for the next era of brand discovery

Leah’s takeaway is clear: the brands that win won’t simply be those that rank highest. They’ll be the brands that AI can find, understand, trust, cite, and ultimately recommend.

#SignalAndNoise #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI #GEO #GenerativeEngineOptimization #AEO #AnswerEngineOptimization #SEO #AIVisibility #AISearch #SearchMarketing #DigitalMarketing #Marketing #MarketingStrategy #BrandStrategy #BrandDiscovery #BrandMarketing #ContentMarketing #ContentStrategy #PublicRelations #EarnedMedia #ThoughtLeadership #FutureOfMarketing #FutureOfSearch #LLM #ChatGPT #GoogleAI #Perplexity #MarTech #CMO #BrandVisibility

Read the full transcript below.

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Brett (00:01.044)

Hey everybody, Brett House here, Signal and Noise. Welcome back. We've got my co-host, Rio Longanker, and a special guest, Leah Nurik. Hopefully it's not Leia. I always screw up the names, I got it right. I didn't ask ahead of time. Yeah, some people are very particular, but Leah Nurik, you're the CEO and co-founder of Brandy AI. Great name, by the way. I love it. It just kind of pops and rings, it has an influencer vibe to it.

Rio Longacre (00:07.516)

Hello everyone.

Leah Nurik (00:14.892)

Yeah, you got it right, but I I I respond to Hey you, lady, whatever. So

Brett (00:31.146)

which is an enterprise AI visibility and generative engine optimization, better known as GEO, one of the many acronyms we'll discuss in today's conversation platform that helps organizations understand how their brands appear across AI-powered search and answer engines. Think think the LLMs from the GPTs to the Clauds to the Perplexities, which is a huge topic in the industry. there were a bunch of announcements from companies like Jellyfish this morning that I saw on the news.

around the category and some of the advancements that are happening, Google as well. and yeah, so welcome to the show. We're thrilled to have you and this is gonna be a fun conversation.

Leah Nurik (01:13.186)

Yeah, I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me today and excited to talk about it with you guys.

Brett (01:17.926)

Yeah. And so a little bit more about Leah. So you've you know, you're kind of one of the the early pioneers of this emerging category, right? And you work primarily with Fortune 500 companies, from what I've read, global agencies, and really about improving AI answer engine visibility, right? And you guys were recognized in 2026 for the Intellix Digital Innovator. You're gonna an award for that, Digital Innovator Award. Good job for the marketing team to to get that. But that's

Really around recognizing innovation and helping organizations navigate this shift from traditional search, which I'm working with a very big UK agency that's offers a lot of search services, kind of like jellyfish called Incubita that does a lot of the same things. So there's a lot of brands and the agencies that provide these traditional services that are navigating the changes. but your background, you know, you kind of runs you ran a a marketing agency called Gabriel Marketing Group, right? For 15 years, which you founded.

Rio Longacre (01:58.727)

Mm.

Brett (02:15.122)

Right. And you did everything from PR to go to market to GEO as well. so you've been a founder, a leader for a long time now. Right? Which is which is a hard path, but it's a it's a very rewarding path, and I'm sure I'm certainly on it myself. And but you were also I found some really interesting facts, you were a fractional CMO at the World Unite for Ukraine. So you're doing some good for the world, which is which is great to hear. And you worked at Motorola, as a GTM lead for enterprise

Leah Nurik (02:37.997)

Trying.

Brett (02:44.296)

device businesses, not to mention a whole bunch of of startups. so again, welcome to the show. I think I've also read that you're a similar or at least at one level or another, right? Napa Valley Wine Academy, that's impressive, right? So you you know we could sometime have a glass of wine and you're the real deal. and you're Yeah exactly.

Leah Nurik (02:56.939)

Yeah, yeah, wow. You really did your research, man.

Rio Longacre (03:03.772)

It's a real deal.

Leah Nurik (03:06.103)

Yeah, well maybe we could do another podcast around rare grapes. Boosting their visibility in AI first.

Rio Longacre (03:12.368)

And root stock and all that stuff, right? Yeah.

Brett (03:14.096)

And rootstock, yeah, it gets it gets really detailed. We did we did a friends of ours had a had kind of a wine tasting, just like a New Year's thing, and it was a whole bunch of folks around the table and I drink I tend to be more of a beer connoisseur than a wine connoisseur, although I do love wine. But my wife is more of a wine connoisseur, and I meant everybody failed the wine tasting test. Like no matter how much I thought I had a good palate.

It was once I got from like Chablis Pinot Grigia to Pin you know, like all these different whites a or reds, one after the other after the other, I just completely lost the ability to tell the difference between them and I failed the test miserably and my wife just passed with flying colours. But I was like I was like she's like, You gotta do a certain amount of liver damage to be really good at telling the difference.

Rio Longacre (03:54.694)

She probably still gives you crap about it, doesn't she?

Leah Nurik (04:02.337)

Yeah, or you need some you need just maybe some more oyster crackers in between and just drink more and you you'll get there. Don't worry. Sounds like your wife's a power user. I like it.

Brett (04:06.856)

Yeah.

Do you s do do you do you s yeah, yeah. And some people spit when they do wine tasting, which I th always found a weird. I understand that it's clearing the palate and stuff, but I always found that it

Leah Nurik (04:18.551)

Well, I've been to a quite a few wine events, like trade events, and you have to spit because you're tasting like thirty five to fifty wines and it and you're start at ten o'clock in the morning. Yeah. Yeah, you would just die. Yeah. So that's when you have to spit, but hopefully not like in sideways, you know, like that movie. You don't want to be spitting like that.

Brett (04:27.442)

You'd be you'd be hammered.

Rio Longacre (04:29.212)

You'd be trashed, yeah.

Brett (04:39.614)

So, and so for the audience, just in terms of like the subject matter, and Rio will get a little bit of this in as we as we talk further. But you know, you're kind of sitting at the center of kind of a genuinely new discipline. I mean, we're talking a year old, maybe less, right? Yeah, and and there's just a lot of terms out there that even being kind of deep and nerdy in the industry, I find sometimes confusing. everything from AI visibility to generative engine optimization, I heard the term which kind of ties to

Rio Longacre (04:51.738)

New and rapidly evolving. It's changed so much in just the last couple of years. Yeah.

Rio Longacre (05:08.622)

Answer engine optimization AEO, that's one display thrown around now.

Brett (05:09.972)

Yeah. Generative engine engine marketing as a category, G E which I just was reading about this morning. And so I think part of the Socratic method, like define your terms so that we know what we're talking about. I think we'll have to get into that once we once we start talking about the topic. But welcome to the show. sorry for the lengthy intro, but I wanted to add some color to who I think is gonna be a great guest. So Leah, it's it's great to have you.

Leah Nurik (05:35.831)

Thanks. Well thanks for having me. And we know that you do your research. Wow, you you really

Brett (05:40.372)

Right, 'cause i you're yeah, there's a person behind this screen, right? That's three dimensional and

Leah Nurik (05:42.515)

Eu assisti uma verdade.

Rio Longacre (05:45.85)

Yeah. Well yeah, well it's yeah, it's fun to see who we're talking to, Leah. And l as Brett mentioned, like we're it's a cool topic. I mean, as we we I mean, if you look back and I think this is a profound change to the way that like people are interacting with the internet itself. You go back like twenty five, twenty six years when Google started. it was pretty simple. You go there, you search for things, it gives you it gives you answers, then you click through to them, right? Like that whole thing is kind of changing and like that's changing like what we optimize for, right? Like over time.

over time we've optimized for impressions, clicks, rankings, backlinks, all the things that really went into traditional search and ultimately conversions, right? But that's completely changing and it's changing really quickly, as we mentioned, y everyone who goes to these, you know, whether it's ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity, you name it, they're going there and they're getting you know, they're giving they're in in inputting deep intents about what they want to do and they're getting back really detailed answers.

And I even look at my myself. I used to have like 30, 40 tabs in my browsers open at all times just so I could have those websites. I only have a few now, right? Just because I'm I'm not going, I don't find that I need to go to those sites to actually look for the content. So it's really changed how people experience the web. And it's obviously changing how companies want to be indexed, how they're viewed, and how they bring their products to market and even get visibility. So it's it's a it's a really interesting time. So how about we maybe start there with the questions? Like

I'm proposing it's a it's a really radical shift and you were having publisher clients tell us they're seeing steep declines in traffic already. Do you think this is the biggest change to online brand discovery since Google trans you since Google pr nailed what we think of as traditional search over twenty years ago?

Leah Nurik (07:32.087)

Yes, without a doubt. You know, and I think we're on, you know, page four of the prologue to war and peace, right? I mean it it it's just the beginning.

Brett (07:39.187)

Page four of the prologue word piece. That's that's awesome. It's about a thousand page tomb for those that haven't read it.

Leah Nurik (07:43.339)

I mean

Yes, yeah. I mean, it's just the beginning, and there'll be a lot of changes, but it's a complete paradigm shift, not only in how marketers do their jobs, but as consumers or even B2B buyers about buyer discovery. It's fundamentally completely different. And the folks who are responsible for ensuring a buyer discovery path within the marketing organization are completely

Not different, but they are the it's more of them. So where it used to be that digital in and of itself owned the clickstream and it owned visibility and and generation of traffic and demand online, it now involves multiple different disciplines within marketing. and so that is a fundamental shift and it's going to change, I think, the way that marketing organizations are structured, how they work together, and

Brett (08:46.331)

The talent that they acquire, right? Yep.

Leah Nurik (08:48.373)

Yep. And yep. It it's it's the budgets are gonna look different. Everything is changing. That's from a business standpoint, right? but also just from a consumer or buyer perspective, whether you're B2B or a or B2C consumer, you are now in control, right? Like the brand was more in control when the link would come back, right? So like the blue link. Now I've got, you know, three pages. Maybe I if I ever get to the third page of blue links and I click, click, click, click, click.

Brett (09:10.098)

Yeah.

Leah Nurik (09:18.368)

my gosh, I have to do all this research on my own. I gotta like click around, I gotta do all that

Rio Longacre (09:22.32)

Yeah, Google inshidified the experience by just polluting it with so many blue links. It went from three to like ten. Now you gotta f l sometimes go to page s either scroll for a while or go to a tightly different page to even get to the actual results that are not sponsored. So I think that isn't that is interesting.

Brett (09:36.967)

Yeah. Yeah, and it's one of the facts that I wrote thirty percent of AI overview citations cited by Google AI overviews don't appear on page one of traditional search. Right? That's a that's a third of all those searches. So they're they're obviously sourcing the information differently than from the traditional indexing of the web of the Yeah.

Leah Nurik (09:58.83)

It's a completely different algorithm. It's I like to think about it like syntax versus semantic. So it before it was, you know, match, match, match, match. And now it's storytelling and readability and technical structure is still important, but content and the story behind it and the authority and credibility of the words that you that you're using also that's incredibly important. And that wasn't really important before. Like just not even important. So

Brett (10:26.278)

Yeah. Yeah.

Leah Nurik (10:28.565)

I mean w I'm talking like, you know, this is the earthquake herd round the world, right? I mean this is it's it's

Brett (10:34.81)

And and your old SEO practices are not gonna carry over as smoothly as you might think they will. Is that

Leah Nurik (10:41.183)

No, not not for so so here's the thing. SEO is still incredibly important. Okay. And so, you know, I like to I like to say, you know, the reports of SEO being dead are widely exaggerated, right? Like it's not dead. Okay. it's just that because you can't be found by the AI engine or read if you're not indexed. So if you don't have the technical structure on your website in order to be indexed and found and read, then you can't

Brett (10:53.01)

Yeah.

Leah Nurik (11:10.809)

you can't y be found. So if you can't be found, then you can't be read, right? So SEO is not dead, people, right? It's just it's playing a role with everything else that is that is contributing to how the brand is positioned and mentioned and what the narrative is in that response.

Brett (11:18.823)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (11:29.852)

So Leah, I have a question though, related to this. So like I've talked to many publisher clients who are telling me they're already seeing like steep drops in referral traffic, 30, 25, 30, 35, even 40%, some of them, right? Which is obviously really challenging for their monetization and business models. But yet, if you look at Google's search results, Q2 2026 plus 17% growth. So despite traffic starting to decline from these.

Leah Nurik (11:37.549)

Mm.

Rio Longacre (11:58.916)

From research referrals, Google search is this is some of the fastest growth it's ever experienced. How do you square that with clearly like there is a change in consumer behavior? I I've noticed anecdotally how I'm it's changed how I interact with the web. how do you square those two numbers?

Leah Nurik (12:16.929)

I don't know, people throwing money at things. Like trying to figure out what the heck they're gonna do. maybe I you know, I mean, I'm I'm not really sure. What I can tell you is is that there's great fear because of that drop off, right? The like you were saying, you know, some 40%. Like what we see is most of our customers, you know, they come to us and they tell us horror stories about drops, you know, of of 30%, like on average. So that's B2B and B2C combined. So

Brett (12:18.968)

Ha ha ha

Leah Nurik (12:45.515)

But here's the what's cool, right? Is that if you have a good presence in AI search, what ends up happening is that the traffic that you're getting, it's converting it at like 6x. So people are already, they're already educated and they've done their research before they come. So like we can even I can even tell you like for our demo requests for for software, right? You know, I've been in the software business my entire career, and we know that when you would get a s a demo request,

On average, if you had a 50% conversion from demo requests to actually getting somebody on the phone, that's 15%. And that was considered a bottom of the funnel conversion, right? You were doing good. Now, what we see is when we get a demo request, they come in, they're converting to get on the phone at more than 50%. Because they've come and like they're because what you used to do, I mean, you'd look at the 10, 12 links.

Brett (13:33.425)

Yeah.

Leah Nurik (13:40.462)

Click, click, click, click, click. my gosh. All right, here I am. All right, there's a demo request. Let me pr demo request. Now I go to the next one. Demo request, demo request, demo request. Well, most people like they'll get on the first demo request. They're like, well, that's pretty good. You know, I don't know, right? And they don't have time for all the demo requests. Now what ends up happening is they come and they're already incredibly qualified. They're requesting two demo requests or three demo requests.

Brett (14:03.536)

Yeah, 'cause they're they're getting closer to the answers they wanna they wanna get to through LLMs, right? And so they're a little bit closer to that and I'm surprised that people are still asking for demo requests, right? It just seems like it that that model might get might slowly go the way of the dinosaurs 'cause it's it's very tied to well yeah. Well it's it's sort of the it's 'cause it's tied to SAS and it's tied to UI based systems and generally per seat licensing, which is going away.

Leah Nurik (14:19.191)

What what would you suggest a video? Video demo?

Brett (14:32.056)

you know, I think the the the facts by two

Leah Nurik (14:33.389)

But the technology, like I i in addition to, you know, grossly exaggerated reports of SEO being dead, I think there's grossly exaggerated reports of SAS being dead. Not everybody Yeah, SAS pocky you can't it mean maybe you can go out and build your own CRM database. You can't go out and take domain expertise and codify it into a, you know.

Brett (14:48.912)

Yeah. The Saspocalypse. Yeah.

Rio Longacre (14:50.907)

Yeah.

Brett (15:00.334)

Yeah, it t they've got decades of experience. And I think I think they're saying by twenty twenty eight that seventy percent of per se seventy percent of of of all perceit licensing business is just is gonna go away. that that's some of the predictions. But to your point, there's still gonna be technology that needs to be shown and demoed. But like as we dive into this topic, because I I am a a strong believer and I sort of think it's it's it's tied to how we run these shows, Rio, is the and I've said it before, but it's the Socratic method. I was a comparative literature major.

So, you know, Socrates would ask partners like like before a debate to sort of define the core concepts like justice or courage or virtue, right? You know, things like that. And so I think before we begin the conversation about all of these things, right? And you've written some reports on this, I think, that sort of defines, helps define SEO versus AEO versus GEO as complementary layers in a in an overarching strategy. Can you help the audience just understand what these things?

fundamentally mean in the difference between them.

Rio Longacre (16:00.06)

Yeah, are they the same? Are they different? Like why are there why are there these different terms? That would be helpful because I I think a lot of people out there are confused, Brett. So that would be a good place to start.

Leah Nurik (16:09.355)

I think that's great. And I do have to give you a shout out though from also a liberal arts major as philosophy. Philosophy and Iranian insular literature, man. Woo! Okay. Well let's so let's define let's define these categories for is Socrates style. So SEO is search engine optimization, right? So SEO, right? Technical structure being found by the search engines and returning a blue link.

Brett (16:14.381)

there we go. There we go. No, it's it's funny because we talk about that a lot. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Leah Nurik (16:37.453)

Right. So that's search engine optimization. Answer engine optimization, you know, to be honest with you, like there's a lot of companies that are, you know, some people call it AEO or answer engine optimization, others call it generative engine optimization. We are in the generative engine optimization camp. They do very much overlap. So for some people they are, but they're I will define them in different ways in order for this purpose.

Brett (16:57.105)

So they're synonymous really. I mean

Brett (17:04.985)

For clarity, yeah.

Leah Nurik (17:06.091)

For clarity, answer engine optimization is how do I optimize the answer? Right? So the answer itself, how does the answer come back? Generative engine optimization is how do I optimize my brand for answers and for generative engines in general. So it's

Brett (17:23.365)

Yeah, to optimize to be brand to be found, period, versus the actual answer that's being returned or potentially returned.

Leah Nurik (17:31.081)

And I look at generative engine optimization as the umbrella with AEO under it.

Brett (17:36.271)

Yeah. No, that's that's a very good dis distinction.

Leah Nurik (17:39.01)

But I also think that it's quite possible that what will happen is that these terms will combine. like I know that a lot of the analyst firms, they're kind of they're using different languages, right? A different language right now. So like Forrester is calling it answer engine optimization, right? So does that win out? And they'll probably come together at some point. But for our purposes, there is a little unique nuance between them. but you will also heard hear them used interchangeably. But we must

Rio Longacre (17:39.74)

I like that.

Brett (18:06.853)

Yeah, and you see a lot

Rio Longacre (18:07.014)

Well Far Store probably have six different reports for for

Brett (18:10.597)

Yeah, trying to figure out what the hell's going on.

Rio Longacre (18:12.284)

Right. And none of which make any sense and all of which are pay to play. That that's probably what'll happen there. But yeah, we're not we're not big we're not big fans of some of the analysts companies on the on this podcast because we we've had some fun discussions about that. But I guess going back to like now now that we've like level set in terms of like the terms themselves, like you described that the w like product con let's say consumer discovery is changing really radically.

Brett (18:15.642)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Brett (18:22.545)

Yeah yeah. The

Rio Longacre (18:42.298)

What is some of your research shown and like how is that impacting? I mean, it maybe maybe we can start there, then we can jump to okay, like what do brands need to do in order like based on these really what you are describing as a seismic shift in consumer behavior, what do brands need to do? Maybe we start with like how have behaviors changed?

Leah Nurik (19:00.673)

Yeah, so I mean, right like e even so if if people are increasingly using LLMs, you know, full stop. It doesn't mean everybody's using an L L Like my eighty three year old father is not using Chat GPT, right? He's still using the Google toolbar. But regardless of whether or not you're moving and

Rio Longacre (19:21.67)

But he's still using AI now if he's using it, 'cause that yeah that had his AI built in.

Leah Nurik (19:25.323)

Exactly. That is my point, right? That it y exactly. So even if you are in the pre existing paradigm of like the Google search bar or the Bing search bar, you most likely you are still getting an AI response. So it d so you know, everybody can argue about who's adopting what LLM and then you can have people say, Well, I'm never gonna adopt an LLM. They may have to at some point. It doesn't matter. AI is here to stay when it comes to consumer behavior, regardless of what

L L or search bar you use. The algorithm is is different. That's it. Full stop. Boom.

Brett (19:59.206)

Yep. Yep. Yep. And and and Google says AI overviews are now well, I think it's probably a bigger number now, but I know in the late twenty twenty five they said that that it's two plus billion monthly users within Gemini. So think about the reach and and you know, consumer sort of reach and and utility that that means. And then you then you add in all of the users, the nine hundred million weekly Chat G BT users, right? It's a large segment of the world's population that's using this now.

Leah Nurik (20:28.757)

It is. And the Google numbers though, you know, they also they don't break it out by who's using the Gemini chat experience versus AI mode versus traditional toolbar. They're talking more about, you know, what what is powering the search, I think. So, you know, but could be that, could be AI mode, could be the Gemini platform, you know. So but regardless, it doesn't it's it doesn't matter because wherever you go, you're getting a summary and that is

Brett (20:38.746)

Yeah.

Brett (20:45.829)

Which is the AI overviews, right? It's the the result yeah.

Leah Nurik (20:58.475)

generated by a different algorithm. So how does that change consumer behavior? And that changes consumer behavior because now like the LLMs, the research shows that people, sure, they have some doubts about the AI response they're getting, but they also tend to trust it to a certain extent. So that means that like, okay, when I get a response from it, I'm going to what maybe potentially with a grain of salt,

Brett (21:00.752)

Yeah.

Leah Nurik (21:24.407)

But I'm gonna take most of what I'm getting at face value and then I'm gonna go deeper and deeper and deeper and I'm going to use this experience. Now, if you're on a mobile phone now, you can't even get out of Google AI mode. So if if I go to the Google toolbar, I'm in AI mode on my phone, I can't get out of it. So I'm forced.

Brett (21:38.566)

Yeah.

Brett (21:42.905)

And and once you once you opt in, right, it's just kind of a permanent feature from what I've seen. Just it's a slightly larger tool. Like once you say I I would like to use a you know, I'm not so I'm not really distinguishing I'm doing only AI mode and then

Rio Longacre (21:43.994)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (21:53.008)

Well yeah, it's hard it's hard to get out. What's interesting too I saw a stat here from from People Link which they they announced the other day that Google search traffic had had fallen forty percent year on year, which is a that's a catastrophic drop. And and now now Google now drives only twenty one percent of traffic down from two thirds a year ago. That's really remarkable, right?

Brett (22:11.62)

Yeah. And and what's even more remarkable about this is the fact that Google, who who came up with the greatest business model ever invented in capitalist systems, with Google search, is actively disrupting and cannibalizing their own business. Right?

Rio Longacre (22:27.814)

Well, y they are but and and my question earlier about like why are they still growing. So my I I would hypothesize that Google's found ways using AI to shift bid shift bidding logic and pe and change minimum spends. That my understanding is they have made some changes to how that works that have increased what they're making per advertiser. And I think advertisers haven't adjusted and Lee, I think you're right about what you said, they're scared.

Brett (22:48.292)

Mm-hmm.

Rio Longacre (22:52.944)

They see traffic falling, they know it's getting channels, they don't know where to spend their money. So I think a lot of them just continue to plow money into Google search. and they are pivoting to AI really quickly. I mean, I you know full disclosure, I bought a bunch of Google stocks last year is one of the best purchases I made, right? you know, they you know, they have like every piece of the supply chain for AI, right? But I do think though that spending on marketing ha and w not only spending on marketing, but what marketers are spending it on tactically, that I think that hasn't adjusted to the new reality yet, but it will.

Leah Nurik (23:22.997)

I agree. And if if I may, I think it's going at tr so we'll we'll see what happens with ad traffic being embedded, or ads being embedded, and you know, a ChatGPT is already experimenting with this. But in reality too, that the the spend is going to have to get spread out.

Right? It's not going to only be about ads. Like there's many different ways to spend money in order to optimize for AI. So the traditional click stream of like, okay, here's the ad. You go to a landing page, you can optimize for conversion. Now you convert. My percentage was X, like a pretty low percentage. Now you're looking at people that are gonna come and convert at a higher rate. So how do I optimize my presence in the response and not just in not

in an not in a paid in the traditional sense way, but paid for organic. Like how do I I put my dollars with the PR firm who is getting me a ton of earned media coverage? I I and and that is driving authority and mentions and bringing me back in the answers and underscoring my credibility of how I tell my story.

Brett (24:27.664)

Yeah.

Brett (24:36.718)

Yeah. And that and that's a that's a brand awareness play to to your point versus sort of a last click play where I'm gonna click on this thing and then be in some sort of conversion path.

Leah Nurik (24:48.097)

Well, what's ends up happening because of this, right? Like most of the time it's it's not super clear about where the citation is coming from. So the amount of referral traffic is not making up for traditional referred from Google traffic or from ads. So what ends up happening is most peop most companies are seeing a a spike in direct traffic. So I see, you know, whatever, the mouse, Logie mouse.

Brett (24:56.143)

Yeah.

Leah Nurik (25:15.711)

And I say, that's a best mouse, because I did my research and I go into the toolborough and I go direct to there to buy it. Or then I ask, where do I buy it? Right. And maybe I go to Amazon direct to do it. So it it's a fundamental difference. So that means that the spend that was traditionally in ads, you know, we'll see how it shakes out. I mean it you know, grossly exaggerated reports that ads are dead, right? No, so

Brett (25:21.231)

Yeah.

Brett (25:39.525)

Yeah. Yeah, and there's yeah, and so and so and so that referral traffic is being replaced by direct traffic. I'd love to see what the numbers are in terms of the increases 'cause we do talk about sort of you know, publisher monetization and traffic has has has dropped as a result of of L LMs, but if there isn't a an equal, I don't think it's an equal, but a at least an incremental increase in direct traffic, that might change the calculus a little bit, right?

Leah Nurik (26:05.197)

Well, it and also with publishers, like my my thought is and is that you're talking about affiliate plays and you're talking about sponsored content and you're talking about even trade rags that didn't that maybe did, you know, on the B2B side, not to get too deep on this, but like cost per lead programs, right? So like let's say you were on the B to B2B side and you would do

Brett (26:23.31)

Yeah.

Leah Nurik (26:30.797)

Cost per lead programs with trade magazines that had the audience, like the dedicated audience for a certain, you know, technical or or niche niche market. And you would do that and they would do things like webinars and and ebooks and email marketing and form dialogue.

Rio Longacre (26:46.438)

And there'd be there'd be a bounty per lead, basically, for those, right?

Leah Nurik (26:48.961)

Yeah. Now those publishers are looking at how do I shift my monetization model? Many of these folks thought that they were going to be out of a job and that they had an off-ramp for their their trade rack, right? Like, okay, well, nobody's coming anymore. I can't sell costs per leads. I can't sell ads. Well, now what they can do is we can see, like in our data, like within Brandy, we have like 700 million data points in the product. You can see which domains in every single market.

Are authoritative. And some of them are rando, not rando, but like, you know, not a household name publisher. And who might have been, or maybe even a a guy in his basement for a blog in a certain market. And these are would have been considered, you know, from a media relations standpoint, like a tier three pub, like not something you would go to for an exclusive or

Brett (27:26.35)

Yeah. A long tail publisher, maybe.

Brett (27:44.846)

Yeah yeah.

Leah Nurik (27:45.454)

know an afterthought and pitching or maybe a byline placement. Now these guys can be driving mentions and authority for these brands. So how do publishers then monetize their content in a way that they've never have really thought of before? Like a great example is Forbes. I don't know how familiar with they do

Brett (28:07.128)

yeah. We've I've been you know, guest guest writing, I've done that for other executives myself. I think Rio you probably have written for Forbes at one where you know, where you can you have this kind of a B to B relationship where you pay a s a subscription fee, all that sort of stuff, yeah.

Rio Longacre (28:08.048)

The Forbes, yeah.

Leah Nurik (28:20.033)

So in I would say that even in the even in our B2C instances, Forbes is usually in the top, and don't take this as gospel because it really does depend on the market, but we see them in B2C and within the top 50 cit domains of citations. Okay. So they have been monetizing contributed articles through their t like council program for years.

Brett (28:46.527)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Leah Nurik (28:47.457)

All right. And it helps thought leadership and it helps backlinks and it does all that. But now they are, you know, that program is a monetization program. So how do other publishers do something similar? Do how do they charge for it? How do they like are there marketplaces that are gonna pop up that look like you know, buy side, sell side ad platforms, but they're for content? So all of this is yet to be determined, but things that are definitely in play.

Rio Longacre (29:16.204)

Leah, I have a question about content and monetization for publishers. So on one hand, there have been many people I know who have been advising publishers, like, prevent prevent these bots from going to your site. Don't let them scrape you. They're gonna scrape you to take your content, which is I mean, let's face it, the initial the initial models, right? That open AI and Claude and all of them, that you they scrape the entire all the information in the world, right? They use it they use those to on the training runs to build their initial models and they've continued to do that, right? So

There's a movement to tell publishers don't let them scrape you, lock it down, and go into obviously you can sell it to them then, right? But at the same time, if they don't have your information, you're not gonna they're not gonna index you at all and they're not gonna recommend you ever, right? So how do you square that tension when you're talking to clients?

Brett (29:50.158)

Yeah.

Leah Nurik (30:03.757)

I mean, I don't have a lot of publishers as customers, so but my here are my thoughts on it. So like, for example, you know, there is a huge ki class action lawsuit that was settled for the f the folks at Cl with Claude, where they weren't only scraping publisher sites, they were scraping people's books, right? and I personally know several authors who benefited from this class action suit because of that.

Brett (30:26.69)

Yeah.

Brett (30:31.811)

Yeah. And through and through and through some some some of these shady sort of aggregators of basically like the world's book content.

Rio Longacre (30:37.51)

Well they they didn't even go to legit sites to get them brett was the problem. They went to actually like illegal places where this where the stuff was pirated and scraped it there to make it worse. So s so so that that's why they ended up losing. Like like it's not it's not as though the if they if they'd actually just found the books online, scraped them, used them, that would have been fair use doctrine, right? But they didn't. They actually went found stolen and pirated versions just to make it worse. So yeah, they they deserved every penny that f

Brett (30:42.413)

Yeah. Yeah, it's like the Pirates Bay of the of the of the days of old, right?

Brett (30:55.149)

Yep. They're in the public domain.

Leah Nurik (31:01.291)

Yeah. So but my advice, so here's a great example, right? So I can tell you in the data too. So the New York Times sued everybody, blocked the crawlers, whatever, right? Okay. Good for you. That's great. Well, my opinion is the New York Times just cut off its nose despite its face. Because if I'm if I'm going to go and decide which reporters I'm going to talk to.

I everybody cares about GEO. They care about visibility. They care about credibility. But the Wall Street Journal has partnerships with the LLMs. So some of the stuff that's even behind the paywall can get read. So if I'm going to say, okay, now the New York Times, it's still the New York Times. They've been around forever, you know, it's like top-tier, all this stuff. But the point is, do they lose cachet because they are not authoritative voice anymore? In the sense of like, if I'm if as a human,

Or a cons consumer or even a researcher of doing something wanting to find out, you know, what what's happening.

Brett (31:59.448)

Yeah. A pass a passive news consumer that isn't subscribing, isn't an authenticated subscriber to that specific publication, isn't gonna find you. Because

Leah Nurik (32:08.437)

And the linkage in my head between the respect that I would have had, like, I mean, you will see in an AI response, hey, the Wall Street Journal says X. Now you can't say the New York Times says this. So the linkage, I mean, we know we're marketers, like you you must create brand linkage in a brain, a consumer brain or a B2B buyer brain, with you know, a brand.

Brett (32:22.285)

Yeah.

Leah Nurik (32:32.363)

So when I keep seeing Axios coming up or Wall Street Journal coming up, and then I actually want to subscribe my dollars from a to a respected news organization, you are not underscoring multiple touch points anymore in the core of how buyer discovery occurs. So the New York Times, one, isn't having their news aggregated by the AI. Two, they're missing out on brand linkage. So what does that mean for them? One, lower subscriber revenue, most likely.

And two, loss of respect in the media world potentially. And it becomes something that, you know, only certain categories of people or whatever or historical subscribers now deem to be as valuable as the trades and and the other media publications that are coming up. So I would advise publishers and the few, you know, the the the few that I do talk to around partnerships and things like that, I would say don't do it, man. Don't don't

Brett (33:17.284)

Yeah.

Leah Nurik (33:29.695)

make your stuff not readable because you if you want to monetize, that's your way forward. Two, if you want to create brand linkage of credibility for your trade publication or your mainstream media publication, that's what you got to do. And third, when you're when your stuff gets cited, you're gonna have a referral link. So you still have the opportunity to have referral traffic from the AI search response. So why would you do it?

Brett (33:31.384)

Yeah.

Brett (33:53.975)

Yeah, but but there's a there's an yeah, there's an economic model that New York Times is sort of saying, hey, if we if we have make all these assumptions and we do a predictive sort of forecast of the numbers of incremental subscribers that we can gain and the lifetime value of our existing subscribers, this is where we'll be, versus if we take this deal Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, and the but versus if we take this deal for this monetization play where we're gonna be given a certain amount of

Rio Longacre (34:12.71)

Well then we can sell them lots of crossword puzzles and and and recipes, right? I mean

Brett (34:23.693)

money to give them access to a certain amount of content. They're doing the math. And I and I think the argument that I've read a lot in the industry is that the amount of money that's being offered to say, hey, we'll give you X amount, let's say Reddit in partnership with OpenAI or whatever, right? Is not it's not a a sound economic argument. They're not getting enough money from the O the from the the L L Ms in order to to to make that that argument.

Rio Longacre (34:47.26)

Well, yeah, you look at the size of these these companies, Brett. I mean their their valuation is in the trillions and they're they'll cut like a thirty million dollar deal, which, you know, for th for the New York Times might seem like a lot of money, but it's it's it's it's laughable, right? When you look at yeah. Yeah. But

Brett (34:54.435)

Yeah.

Brett (34:58.883)

But in the long term it may not be, and they and they feel that so they're doing some sort of economic calculus that says this is not worth it in the time being. But you're suggesting, Leah, that in the long term, maybe even in the midterm, this is gonna have a downstream impact on their ability to to gain new incremental subscribers, right? Yeah.

Leah Nurik (35:17.119)

I think it's extremely myopic. I I d I mean, it's like, you know, somebody, you know, six months ago said to me, I think this AI, what are you guys doing? I think AI's a flash in the pan. I mean, does the New York Times actually think that? Like, do these publishers that are blocking things like I mean, any new market, right? Like you don't do the economic calculus if you are a brand like I mean, I I'm not trying to take a stand against the New York Times. Just want to say I am I am a subscriber and it is like I read it every day and I do do all the cr not the

Rio Longacre (35:27.644)

Someone said that.

Brett (35:29.796)

Yeah.

Brett (35:41.196)

Yes. Yes.

Leah Nurik (35:46.914)

Big crossword puzzle but the mini because it's too much for me with the big crossword. But I mean I I just think that like any whenever there is a market shift like this, you don't look at a year, you don't look at 18 months, you don't like they're losing ground already. Publishers who don't play in this world, you're losing your your your brand, your brand connection, your credibility, your visibility, the ability to build credibility around that brand.

by not being included in the new paradigm of of search. That's that's my

Brett (36:20.268)

Yeah, yeah, and there's this uncertainty of how much value of of like where this is going and so they get into kind of probably an analysis paralysis loop where they're like, Well the economics don't seem to be making six sense because we can't like accurately predict where this is going to go and so we're just going to do nothing. That's the problem.

Leah Nurik (36:38.605)

I got a question the other day from somebody who said, Well, if if you if we do this now, are we building category leadership or can we wait? Like, does it matter? Right? and so you know, that's a great question. Because are they cutting off their nose to spite their face for today, or are they creating lasting damage to their property? So I would I would say

in my opinion, you know, take it for what that's worth, is that you are creating lasting damage to the brand property because you're losing the drafting of potential subscribers because they don't have the emotional linkage to the New York Times right now that you would get in AI search results. But the larger question is does recency of citation and the way that answers come back, is it sticky sticky sticky? Like forever?

Like back in the day, you would get the keyword for, you know, you know, best allergy medicine for chronic sufferers of hay fever. You would get that keyword and forget about it. You could never get it if you had something else, right? Because the company that o that owned it and got it, you know, back in 2012 or 2011, you were never going to override it. Is that the case with the LLMs? Right. And so that is a

Brett (37:33.677)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (37:59.622)

Well, our citation are citations suddenly like more important again, right? As it is what's old is new, right? As it and it might be for different reasons, right? But like like is is it safe to say or fair to say that citations are becoming more important now that we're going to AI generated answers that these answer engines, these L L Ms are giving people?

Leah Nurik (38:19.905)

I mean, citations are what it's all about, man. Like it's like, okay, you get cited and that cited informs the answer. So it so like let's say that you're trying to define a market, right? I'm trying to define my view of like what the best mouse is. And like, you know, I'm a mouse creator. I've just disrupt I think I've disrupted the mouse world, right? I've created something sustainable, it's great for ergonomics, it does all these things, it never dies, it's

rechargeable on its own, it connects without you you wanting to bang your head against the wall, all that good luck. So so you know, I go out and I I disrupt the the the mouse market. The citations, they inform the definition of a market. So the nuance of like it it goes and it cites my blog and then it cites, you know, the article in Forbes and it cites

Brett (38:53.262)

All these problems that people have with mice or mouses.

Leah Nurik (39:18.111)

reviews and it cites all the other unpaid sources and it does all that that that makes the your view of tissues to be Kleenex, right? Or and so that's that's the power

Brett (39:30.872)

Yeah. Yeah, no that that is brand advertising in a different way. And they they do say I think I've read that somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of of AI overviews are not fully supported. Meaning they're not fully supported by s citation, right? or inaccurate citation.

Rio Longacre (39:46.63)

But but but looking whether it's a citation or not, right? Or I mean when you look at like when it gives a recommendation, right, it's actually making I mean, I would argue it's making a judgment, right? That and it's not just giving you back a list of hey, hey, I'm a neutral arbiter, here's a list of even though maybe Google never was that, right? But here's a list of links, which you could then advertise in if you wanted to. But it's actually giving you a curated list that makes dis there's a decision behind it. I mean, is is this fundamentally changing what

Brett (39:52.888)

Yeah.

Brett (39:56.717)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (40:14.214)

what marketing is, right? I I think it kind of is, right?

Leah Nurik (40:17.805)

I mean it it so there's a couple things to unpack and in I think in in what you just said. Number one is fundamentally changing marketing, I I think, one hundred percent. But I also say that like it's not it's giving you a curated list that it determines of what is credible and authoritative, but it's really hard to get the AI to take a stand. I don't know if anybody saw that funny South Park episode where like the dad is

Asking AI, he gets addicted to AI. They it's relatively sycophantic. If I ask it, like, okay, what's the best mouse?

Rio Longacre (40:54.886)

More than relative. I mean it's incredibly single fantic. Yeah, it's it's it's crazy.

Brett (40:55.999)

Ha ha ha.

Leah Nurik (40:57.953)

You're so awesome. What a great question about these mouse. But if unless I ask it directly about certain brands, you can't really uncover what it thinks. If I say, like, what's the best mouse or what's the best allergy medicine for this situation? It's going to give you multiple options without really taking a stand. It might more often than not, it'll say something like,

Brett (41:01.601)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Leah Nurik (41:24.439)

Well, here are options that people tend to use and blah blah blah blah blah and this is kind of great for this and great for that and all that. But then when I ask it directly, like how does Acme Corporation stand up against Beta Corporation? Then you find the meat of what is really hiding in the logic and what it really thinks.

Brett (41:46.316)

Yeah, and it and it could and it could give you a sense as a consumer, a sense of like like false confidence, right? Like that those answers about brand A, brand B are accurate because the LLM is so smart. It's this incredible, you know, AI capability. But but it could be inaccurate, right? Like you could be getting inaccurate information, outdated information. It could be coming from

Reddit sources or Wikipedia sources that haven't been updated or managed by the brand. How does the brand, how does a CMO sort of have to think about this? Like how do I measure, see what's actually being shown, and then figure out how I can optimize around improving the types of answers predictably that these that these LLMs, the various LLMs are giving. I mean, that's a that's a tough process. And I'm not sure CMOs have their arms wrapped around this.

Leah Nurik (42:34.685)

Most of them do not. But so like critically important right now is exactly what you're talking about, that meat of the answer. Not just was I mentioned or was I cited, but like is it right, is it wrong, is it good, is it bad?

Brett (42:46.711)

Yeah.

Brett (42:51.199)

And and this is AEO, just for right, this is the AEO. The actual content of the answer is as much as you can control it, which needs content.

Leah Nurik (43:00.981)

you need to mine it, right? Like, for example, like the insight to find out where it is getting it from. So you made you made a really good point that you know sometimes it's inaccurate. So there is it inaccurate because it's fine, it's citing the information and the information's out of date from like training data. Or is it inaccurate because it can't even find an answer? So it's just making crap up. And it could be both. So that's why, as a brand marketer, it's incredibly important to understand.

Brett (43:23.138)

Yeah.

Leah Nurik (43:30.027)

What is being said about your brand? Where is it getting from it from? And third, to produce and take action, produce the content or take action in a manner that actually answers the questions that people are asking. Because what we know is that if it can find a recent credible, authoritative answer to the questions that people are asking, it will bring it back. But if it can't.

It's gonna make it up or it's gonna start going in a training data from like two thousand. I mean, I have a I had a custom. Yeah.

Brett (44:05.057)

Yeah, and out outdated training data and in like and what about what about because I we I did some research on on AU and this was about a year ago, but just is what were the sources of information that were driving perplexity versus ChatGPT versus Claude? And you know, like fifty to seventy percent of the total information that they were citing and leveraging was was kind of social driven. There was Reddit was a big play, Wikipedia was a big play.

There like and I wouldn't consider Reddit is which is that company has transformed as a result of this, right? They started they they have yeah, they've gained the whole search ecosystem. I know. Which talk about brand safety, right?

Leah Nurik (44:39.287)

Yeah, it'd be a good year to be a Reddit, that's for sure.

Rio Longacre (44:42.318)

Yeah, the fact they're basing answers on Reddit is kind of like head scratching to me as well as I mean Wik even Wikipedia, which is which has degraded quite a bit, right, in terms of quality of quality of the the content.

Brett (44:55.531)

Yeah.

Leah Nurik (44:56.309)

So to so you know, to answer your to just kind of speak to it, because we have the data that's in the product is that it I know nobody likes to hear this, but it depends on the market. So, like for example, the domains that are being cited for, you know, if your HubSpot, if you're running an AEO or Geo instance of HubSpot are different than if you're running it for Jeep. Right. And so like you there's people on LinkedIn and everything saying like,

Brett (45:08.087)

Okay.

Leah Nurik (45:25.419)

90% of the citations come from social and and earned media. Well, yeah, for some markets, but not for everything. So it that that's why it's so critically important for marketers to really lock in to what's going on in their space. And so that's why, you know, not to be like plug brandy, but like that's one of the things that kind of made us make brandy. Like, are the markets different? Where do you go? What do you do?

Who do you reach out to? What what do you do on Reddit? if you is Reddit even important? Is LinkedIn important?

Brett (46:00.139)

Yeah. And by markets you mean traditional DMAs, regional regional places? industry categories. Yeah, like your your industry category, your product category, and and and where information around that particular category is generally cited or sourced, is that yeah.

Leah Nurik (46:05.013)

No, I just mean like your sector, like okay. In the mouse sector. Yeah, cat work. Yeah.

Leah Nurik (46:18.859)

Yeah. So like for example, we've had a instance running for like off-road vehicles that has Jeep as like its center as like a demo for forever. Well, forever for a year, you know, since this whole thing started. And and for that, I can tell you that for automotive, it's more than ninety per for consumer, it's more than ninety percent earned media and social that gets cited versus like owned content on websites. Now, if you look at the CRM

market like HubSpot and Salesforce on the B2B side, it's not that. It's more corporate sites. So like HubSpot and Salesforce are at the top for getting cited. LinkedIn is there. There's a couple of you know the Reddit is further down on the

Brett (47:02.09)

Yeah. And they have massive amounts of like authoritative content in their knowledge centers, in their yeah, which which I'm assuming yeah.

Rio Longacre (47:09.286)

Give but yeah, pivoting to trust for a second. I think this is an important topic here. Like I remember back in the day with with normal search, I remember people would try to figure out like the Google algorithm, they try to reverse engineer it, right? And people figure it out at one point, backlinks are a way to right. So people would like create all these phony sites with backlinks that were like maybe hidden, right? there are different ways to game the system. And Google would always pivot and change and usually stay a couple steps ahead, right? You know, because they w because they're very smart. But like that.

Do you see similar things happening here where people figuring out how these algorithms work, how these these LLMs function, how to get cited more often, how to be, how to have your company's product or whatever whatever something about your your brand included in the response? or are they so fundamentally different it's really impossible to do that?

Leah Nurik (48:00.3)

No, I mean that's why we have that's why we have a product. There is a way to do it. Yeah, but it's I but I wanna I wanna create the I wanna definitely kind of expand on that because there were a lot of products that were around gaming the system and tricking the algorithms right in the SEO world. Don't do that with GEO. Don't yeah, like like fundamentally, like for us, we are a very mission-driven company and and I it's not like

Rio Longacre (48:03.74)

That's your business, right? Yeah.

Brett (48:15.543)

yeah.

Text link ads. And there was a company actually, yeah.

Leah Nurik (48:29.173)

just ethically like don't trick things is bad, but you know it is. But in addition to that, it's really bad business because everybody remembers the panda update. Everybody was on their heels, right? So what you need to do if you want to win the you really want to win your category, you can't trick it because you can't trick Reddit. You get banned. You start posting stuff on Reddit, you're out in a minute, right? You can't

Flood fake reviews for the long term. Like, why would you do that? Instead, put out credible, authoritative content, bring to market good product. If you have a crisis because there's a problem, address the crisis in content and earn media. And one of the things that is really exciting about AI for me anyway, I've spent my entire career.

Talking to brands about being mission driven and really living their brand promise and living the truth. AI is regulating that without regulation.

Brett (49:37.728)

Yeah, without and without con maybe the right context. Yeah.

Leah Nurik (49:42.517)

It they're gonna find you out, right? Like you know, i it i i if if you're really crap and you're not fulfilling on your brand promise, from where AI is taking the citations from and the authority from

Brett (49:44.012)

Yeah.

Brett (49:55.061)

It's gonna get it from Reddit is where it's gonna get it. Right? That's where you have those sort of Yeah, or worse. Right.

Rio Longacre (49:57.562)

Yeah.

Leah Nurik (49:58.414)

We're we're specifying it.

Rio Longacre (50:00.036)

Or worse, right.

Leah Nurik (50:02.305)

Or trespil it, you know, or G two or

Brett (50:04.608)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Those are all yeah, high authority for sure, for sure, especially for B to B selection. Well I right

Rio Longacre (50:08.326)

So Leah, one thing you've written written about recently that I thought was very interesting and I by the way I I do agree with because I wrote recently about how AI potentially might end the concept of a campaign the way we looked at it, right? but like so you wrote about like it changing a competitive advantage from execution to trust and context. is that message resonating with your customers and any thoughts on that?

Leah Nurik (50:34.113)

Yeah, it is. It it it depends on the organization. So, you know, a lot of the digital folks, they need to like shift their mindset. So a lot of the the the people who are driving GEO and AEO in the beginning, it may start with digital and then it evolves and then it may include digital and then it becomes brand and comms and product marketing and growth marketing.

Right. So people who are looking at multidiscipline things. so you know, they that resonates with them for sure. And like they they get it, but it's again, right? Page four of Prologue to War and Peace, right? It's the beginning, and though there's gonna be the you know, the lovely fringe lunatics, right? Who are like, Let's experiment, let's do, let's get this done and figure it out. And then there's gonna be

You know, the folks who are gonna sit back and and see how it all plays out. and unfortunately for those, it makes a lot of sense if you're risk adverse in this new world to sit back. But if you do so, I've I think we would make the argument that you're missing out on an opportunity for category definition that will feed the knowledge and the authority and credibility of the AI engines today throughout the long term.

Brett (51:51.392)

Yep. So I so I have a question around sort of GEO or or AEO, but GEO is sort of entering the paid media ecosystem. There's been some announcements from companies like Profound Ad Studio, Evertune ChatGPT, Ad Messenger, that that they're expanding from sort of organic AI visibility. you know, and and there's this kind of motion towards sort of organic plus paid discipline rather than just staying siloed. I mean, are you seeing

You know, Jellyfish just had an announcement for their share of model expansion, which kind of points at the same thing 'cause it it reaches into channels like TikTok and D V three sixty and YouTube and r you know, which are not which are paid media channels. Do you see a convergence happening? Are your brands talking about this? Or are we still because we're on page four of of War and Peace here, are we still is it still really premature? And it's just companies putting out press releases to

Get some hype around the topic.

Leah Nurik (52:48.705)

I don't I mean, I don't know what they're doing, but I mean it's it it it's it's early for that. Like ChatGPT is just starting to roll out ads and experiment with it. So I mean you're talking it's pretty early. We talked about some other paid things, like w what does it look like for sponsored content? Right. then there was like time was talking about like markdown ads, like you know, stripping things out and doing markdown ads for readability, serving that up.

Brett (53:06.763)

Yeah.

Brett (53:16.523)

Yeah.

Leah Nurik (53:16.639)

Is it really an ad or is it really educating the model? Like what do the models do to react to it? So

Brett (53:20.746)

Yeah. And that's sort of context behind the ad that's like that's got full context behind the the brand or the promise or the product or whatever. Yeah, a markdown ad. That's an interesting concept. Yeah.

Leah Nurik (53:29.195)

Yeah, they they just made Yeah, like they strip stuff out. They just there was just a article that came out about this in Digiday, like this week, I think, where it is basically time is doing like they're experimenting with getting rid of like traditional ads and like doing like markdown, like readability ads. So basically the concept and think about it like this: like everything we're talking about about how do you create owned content or earned media that underscores authority.

credibility in order to control the narrative of your brand in an AI search or maximize for mentions or optimize for mentions, right? Full stop, boom. Now the concept I believe is like, hey, you can do that through an ad. You can call it ad

Brett (54:12.349)

Integrate that into kind of a paid media ad and maybe it's the metacopy, the metadata that's behind the ad that's got all of this context so that it's that's readable. it's text pages. It's literally text pages, wow.

Leah Nurik (54:19.885)

It's like text pages. But but you can call that you can call that markdown ads or you could just call it sponsored content. I don't care what you call it, it's kind of the all the same gist. So so that's basically is it the same as Forbes Tech Council? Is it the same?

Brett (54:27.572)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (54:32.816)

Well well question about that, Aaliyah. Like if if people are creating ads specifically for L L LMs versus ads specifically for people, I mean, do we end up like at some point really having two internets, right? There's an internet for for people to navigate and then there's an internet like which would include ads, which would include content that's completely 'cause you you would definitely want to structure your your site and your pages in a way they could be scraped or or crawled very differently for I mean, or you might not even need maybe you just send it directly by API, but I'm

I mean thoughts on that? Like is this creating like two parallel internets?

Leah Nurik (55:05.559)

So I mean, I don't know. I so I I wouldn't even call it like ads. Right? Like I mean that you can call it ads, like okay, it's basically a page that's readable that has the positioning of the company and like okay, I this is

Rio Longacre (55:20.412)

But would it have offers? Would it have updated offers with new prices and things that you'd want to be promoting to the to the large language models then?

Leah Nurik (55:28.491)

Yeah, and and why do you want to do that? Because you want it to get read and you want it to come back in the response. So you can pay so

Rio Longacre (55:33.83)

But but is this corrupting the agent's intent then? Because the agent's supposed be representing the person who's who spun it out, right? Like I mean, we'll go into Gentic, which is a which is I think slightly different than just like a lot changing an LLM. But like I think that's an interesting philosophical discussion. I mean, 'cause you'd want to make sure they know about your your latest offers, right? And are aware of them. but like unlike humans who are distracted, you don't really need advertising has a very different context where you don't necessarily need to serve up an ad to get people's attention. The L the the

Brett (55:43.371)

Ha ha.

Brett (55:48.404)

Yeah.

Brett (56:00.257)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (56:01.56)

AI is so fast it it can consume infinite amounts of information infinite almost infinitely fast, right? So w would you we

Brett (56:06.687)

Yeah, and these markdown ads seem exactly for the purpose of training an agent versus actually a human interaction event that's engaging and interesting and and they they're two different contexts completely, which is that's a really good question because yeah, they 'cause that that's not a good user experience to arrive at a page where you've got a whole bunch of of just content associated with a particular ad. Yeah.

Rio Longacre (56:26.342)

Right, but for for for an agent it's fine.

Leah Nurik (56:29.089)

No, but that but but also it's all the same concept. So like if I were to post my my r latest off of offers on my webpage, or I would, you know, get an influencer to do it on something that's readable on like Instagram, or I use my affiliate to d write an paid sponsored content for it, it's it's really all the same concept of okay, I pay time to post

A markdown page that's readable by the AI. It's all the same thing. It's all the same intent. Same intent. The intent is of the brand in order to have the right information, the accurate information, and to have their brand narrative as well as brand mention optimized in the response of the AI. So then the question becomes does what are the what do the models do? Like the models themselves aren't doing that. So do they start penalizing time because time's trying to hack them? Not

Brett (57:12.873)

Yeah. Yeah.

Leah Nurik (57:25.303)

Hack, but they're trying to hack the system. They're trying to game the system. Like, are they gonna be okay with that? And so I would make the argument, like, we don't know yet. So do you wanna like potentially create issues with your brand and potentially, you know, become the JCPenney of the AI world when getting completely like screwed and get, you know, right? So do you wanna do that or do you want to publish authoritative?

content that's future proofs your brand that tells the true story, that tells the brand promise, and that when you do that organically, then you know it's accurate and you're not going to get penalized in the long term as the models shift. Because

Brett (58:08.521)

Yeah. No, that's a good point.

Rio Longacre (58:08.664)

Leo, by the I agree with you, and I here's why I agree with you on this. I think because this is for the same reason why I always hated QR codes and thought they were dumb. I think that ultimately, once AI gets better, AI image recognition is outstanding now. It can actually recognize numbers and text extremely well. So why do you need a freaking QR code, right? So my point was always QR codes are a bridge technology and not even not even an elegant one. And once AI gets good enough, I think it'll be the same thing. People are creating special pages for crawlers now because of

Brett (58:24.587)

Plants, insects, yeah.

Rio Longacre (58:37.904)

maybe even the limitations of some of the crawlers, but I think as like as the as people realize that like they're they're incredibly fast, if you put good content out there for people, AI can consume it even faster, but just as well and can and can synthesize and use it just as well. So I actually think that's a really good point. but quick question then about and and I I know you do have a hard stop at a certain point. I did want to get into I'm getting a lot of questions from clients about how does this impact what the marketing org looks like. Do we need to hire like a

an AEO or GO specialist, if not like who does this? Does the SEO team does this? Do we need someone new who does this? Because clearly this is this slightly different role, right? It's not it's not it's it's maybe less technical and but more cross functional thoughts.

Leah Nurik (59:22.303)

It's not, it's not so who you need to hire is a really good marketing leader who can can create a team of collaborators who can all do it because PR plays a role, digital plays a role, content plays a role, product marketing plays a role, brand plays a role. And your agency partners that are on the outside, they also play a role. So you want to see the impact, like if you have a paid team and they're spinning up landing pages.

You wanna know are the landing pages being read? Are they actually informing the AI? Is the work that you paid for the PR folks, the PR agency, is it actually driving increases in AI visibility? So you I Rio, you I agree with you. I can't i if I if there could be more than a hundred percent, I would because it this is a kind of

Brett (01:00:11.816)

Yeah. But but but I would argue though, I would argue that all of those roles that you just described, PR, product marketing, demand generation, whoever they are, are gonna collapse into single people. And you're gonna have single people that have had that that that have kind of because they've got agents behind them, they can can do a lot of yeah, they can do a lot of the work, right? You don't agree. Yeah, I think so you don't agree with the the idea that some of these roles are gonna

Leah Nurik (01:00:24.277)

No.

Rio Longacre (01:00:30.598)

Yeah Leah, I agree. I I I I

Leah Nurik (01:00:32.429)

But I don't agree. I no, because and listen comparative literature major.

Brett (01:00:40.65)

The death of specialization, you don't agree with that that approach?

Rio Longacre (01:00:41.659)

Ha ha.

Leah Nurik (01:00:44.587)

No, listen, listen, the comparative literature major, right? With your abstract conceptual thinking, which no, seriously, right?

Brett (01:00:53.146)

It's true You can tell just by this podcast. Yeah, yeah.

Leah Nurik (01:00:56.319)

No, I'm no, but hear me out. Okay. So there are different personalities that are good at different things. The people who major in comparative literature tend to like really good big ideas of abstract concepts. And they look at abstract concepts and then they look at the pieces that go in in order to draw to have that abstract concept. The people who are more engineering minded, they look at the pieces and then they build up to the abstract concept. So

I mean, not to overly stereotype, but what I'm saying is is that one person earned like PR is extreme extremely specialized dish discipline. Not everybody can do PR. Guess what? Not everybody can do SEO. And what you need to do is there's certain talents. And if you could find the person who could pitch the New York Times, tell complex stories in an easy way, optimize all your pages for technical SEO.

Write really great content that takes hours and you could find one person to do that. I mean, you can't. It's just not capable. No person is capable of all of those talents unless they're like, I don't know, they have sold their soul. So what I'm saying is that you need a mark, you need a leader who understands the personalities and the disciplines and can create collaboration and that they can be empowered by technology.

The agent behind those things, the human, our our data shows well written human content, optimized for geo, optimized for structure, optimized for readability, sticky, sticky, sticky, lasts longer. So it's not an agent. You can't press a button and make it all good. It's not, I don't, I don't think that's the world that we're heading towards. I really don't.

Brett (01:02:42.538)

Yeah.

Brett (01:02:48.713)

Really, you're gonna make a point.

Rio Longacre (01:02:50.64)

No, I really I really like that. Actually, I think that the more I think about this, I mean I there will be some roles that get eliminated. Like that's just inevitable, right? but I I I I I predict that in five years there will be more people working in marketing than there are today. because marketing will grow as a profession as more pe more money goes into it. It actually is growing faster than the economy. And I think that just as though all those predictions about job wipeouts are all wrong, I think AI is creating more jobs.

I think that certain things, jobs will change. People's tasks will change radically. This is gonna be the biggest shift in how people work work in you know, since since the computer probably, right? but but but I don't th I don't see wholesale elimination elimination of these things because having a great AI is there, but you need to know to ask it. And I don't care how good it is, it can c if you ask it the right things, give it the right inputs, and it learns how to work with you, it gets better and better and better.

Brett (01:03:29.128)

Yeah. Since the Industrial Revolution, yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:03:45.05)

And may you maybe some companies will figure out how to automate away some roles, but I think I think they're gonna find they need human judgment and human and human inspiration in there.

Brett (01:03:51.016)

Yeah. And that's that's where specialization's gonna live as well, right? The ability to know how to orchestrate and conduct, whether it's other team members that are human or human supplemented by a agents, right? That you need that you need specialization to the degree of being able to orchestrate that process. If it's a PR process to your point, or if it's more of a tech operations product build process within the marketing organization, I think you got a good point.

Rio Longacre (01:04:00.89)

Or agents, yeah, for sure. I mean agents will be a big part of it, Brett, there's no doubt.

Leah Nurik (01:04:16.213)

I I just I I just wanted to make one point that when so part of the art of marketing and storytelling is is the uniqueness of the point of view, right? AI, by its definition, is the synthesis of what already exists. So if you really want to stand out and you really want to emotionally and empathetically connect with your p prospective buyers and your customers, you're looking at you need that uniqueness.

Brett (01:04:33.736)

Yeah.

Leah Nurik (01:04:45.353)

AI cannot be unique. I'm sorry. It just can't and and it by its very definition. It may be able to think, it may be able to solve problems, but it cannot empathetically and emotionally connect. And so that is advertising. That is why people buy. So you need that element.

Brett (01:04:55.517)

Yeah.

Brett (01:04:59.774)

Yeah. That's that yeah, that's key to brand IP, that's cre that's key to advertising effectiveness, it's key to creative differentiation because there is a flattening that happens with AI because it sort of de it devolves to the mean, so to speak. But this has been great. I knew it was gonna be interesting. Yeah, let's go to quick hits. I'll start. So SEO or GEO, we'll just use we'll say AEO GEO.

Rio Longacre (01:05:16.922)

Shall we get a quick hits?

Brett (01:05:27.506)

Which will matter more five years from now? You've said how SEO's not going away, but what do you think?

Leah Nurik (01:05:31.661)

G-O-S-G-O-A-O, absolutely, one hundred percent. you're asking me, right? Okay, just want to answer.

Brett (01:05:36.702)

Yep. Quick hit for you, Rio. Yeah. So so a hundred percent even though C is even though SEO is not going extinct, it'll still matter for certain use cases.

Leah Nurik (01:05:49.485)

It's it's it it becomes a tactic of S of GEO and AEO in order to ensure findability and indexability.

Brett (01:05:56.426)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:05:57.66)

That makes sense. Leah, what's one piece of AI marketing advice that is almost universally accepted, but you think is complete BS?

Leah Nurik (01:06:09.238)

Leah Nurik (01:06:13.815)

Trick like like it's all about that that search and brand discoverability is about tactic and not strategy. So like people are always trying to like trick trick trick the algorithms and undermine it and then Yeah, I I can't stand it. It it gives me all the ick.

Brett (01:06:28.989)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:06:29.798)

The gaming the system thing, yeah.

Brett (01:06:31.912)

Yeah.

Yeah. So so what's one signal every brand should monitor for AI visibility, you know, in terms of trackability and measurability that most CMOs aren't tracking today but's having an impact?

Leah Nurik (01:06:47.415)

Deep sentiment and narrative. Deep sentiment and brand narrative. It's not only about being mentioned, but it are you being mentioned accurately in in a positive and negative manner. So the ability to mine that is like that is the core.

Brett (01:06:58.366)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:07:03.44)

What's one? Mark?

Leah Nurik (01:07:03.561)

We have we have a pattern on that on that component. W that we're very passionate about it. Over here at Brandy.

Rio Longacre (01:07:10.396)

Love it. What's one marketing role that becomes much more important as we go further into this era?

Leah Nurik (01:07:17.549)

PR earned media, without a doubt. Without a doubt. They PR was down. They were they were down and out for a while. and and now they're back with force collaborating with their digital cohort and colleagues.

Rio Longacre (01:07:19.729)

I like that. Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:07:33.542)

That's wild and so contrarian, right? Because everyone thought, like this thing can write press releases better, faster than any person which is true, right? PR is dead, but PR is not just press releases. So I I I think that's a great that's an excellent point. Our friend Chris Harahar, right, is gonna be very pleased to hear that.

Brett (01:07:35.937)

yeah.

Leah Nurik (01:07:41.485)

No puedo rotular.

Brett (01:07:48.958)

Yeah, yeah. And I and I've I've certainly learned the ropes of PR with some of the the big B to B folks at Chris R and Ben Billingsley, but I've I've been bit down on PR. and I've fired PR agencies because I've been so down on PR. And I and I and maybe it's just completely ill founded, but I'm like, well you know, because they're just f on the in the B to B side of things, they didn't have the subject matter expertise about the product, the category, oftentimes

or the ecosystem, the competitive ecosystem in which your your your product lived, right? and and they didn't have the commercial acumence, you know, to to to to be able to really position this in in market. And so I was like, well what are you providing then? And and so Yeah, well we should have a separate podcast on PR, the rise of PR. Because yeah, 'cause it was to me, it was like, is there is it's a Rolodex and press releases, but your press releases aren't cutting it.

Leah Nurik (01:08:31.403)

Right. We could have a whole separate b podcast if you're talking to the wrong person those those things.

Brett (01:08:43.377)

And your Rolodex a lot of us already have. So what you know, but again, I'm underestimating I think the holistic value.

Leah Nurik (01:08:49.983)

Disagree. I disagree. But that's that's okay. We can agree to disagree. I think that I think that PR, they are the storytellers. They're they're the comparative literature majors. They're the people who can tell complex stories in easy to understand ways. It is a very unique and sophisticated and intelligent discipline where you are basically herding cats to try to get them to do what you want them to do, and you have no power over getting them to do what you want to do. So you have to be creative and smart.

Brett (01:08:59.667)

Yeah.

Brett (01:09:07.111)

Yeah.

Leah Nurik (01:09:19.783)

and I you know, but I I was a PR person, so that's why that's why I feel this.

Brett (01:09:23.571)

Yeah. Yeah. No no and and I yeah, I no I totally get it. And it's just it's more of a I guess I guess I I I you know, Rio and I both work and live in a very technical space and without the technical acumen and knowledge, and then everything around that, meaning the other brands and the other players that are that are providing services or solutions, without that knowledge you're sort of nothing. And and what I found is oftentimes that knowledge is missing.

Rio Longacre (01:09:50.916)

And Brad plus everyone knows each other anyway, it's very incestuous. So a PR person's not gonna know more p yeah.

Brett (01:09:53.587)

Haha it's very ancestrus. So it's probably just our category and I agree with you because I have a comparative literature major and I think narrative and storytelling is incredibly but it has to be backed with something, with substance, and that that's key. but this has been great. we should definitely have another episode about about the rise of PR because I think that isn't a very interesting topic. and and we should dive into that more deeply. But thank you, Leia, for joining us today. I know we took you a little over time. Yeah, it's been it's been a pleasure. Thanks for for going to bat and and getting

Rio Longacre (01:10:07.644)

Been fun.

Leah Nurik (01:10:16.364)

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Brett (01:10:23.25)

Getting you know, open and and honest about a lot of these things that you're dealing with on a day-to-day basis. Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:10:27.1)

This is great discussion, super fun. Yeah, we we enjoyed it.

Leah Nurik (01:10:30.104)

I like you guys are s really sharp. I I really appreciate it. This is a really fun intellectual conversation and thanks for having me and thanks for listening if you're listening too. So thanks.

Brett (01:10:41.404)

That's awesome.

Rio Longacre (01:10:41.616)

And Leah before we before we before we do our final spiel here, which only takes a second, like how if people want to get a hold of you or you're finding about your company, where do they go?

Leah Nurik (01:10:49.342)

you can go to my brandy with an I, so my brandy B R A N D I dot A I. Or you can just follow me on LinkedIn at Leah Nurek yeah, so

Brett (01:11:01.062)

You're out there, you're talking, you're p thought leadership, you're on podcast. So so everybody check Yeah. She she is she is she is built for AEO and GEO, so you're gonna find her and it's gonna be relevant and accurate. Yeah. So and so everybody visit us at DebW Deb dot signal and noise dot AI, and in in whatever platform, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, that you absorb content in whatever form.

Leah Nurik (01:11:05.942)

Or search for me in AI and maybe something'll come up.

Leah Nurik (01:11:15.682)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:11:15.846)

In citations, yeah.

Brett (01:11:29.744)

or however long it is. we are there. And we're gonna be at events, we're gonna be at advertising week 2026 doing a big activation. And we're putting out a ton of really awesome articles, deeply insightful and well researched articles. Rio is certainly leading the charge there and I think a lot of people know that. so check us out and we'll see you next time.

Rio Longacre (01:11:30.982)

We are there.