Hey-o!

Thanks for reading this! BTW I'm open to new F/T opps... more on that at the end:

Onward

I've got some thoughts about chat search or "generative engine optimization" (GEO?) I don't like that term, but...

At this stage, it seems like your brand appearing in ChatGPT or Perplexity or Gemini or Claude is a vanity metric.

I don't have as much access to client search data as many people do on this very email list, but at my most recent stop at Tettra, I know that Perplexity provided maybe 1/100th of our traffic (the others don't always list the websites they source their info from...hahahaha...ohh.......)

Google search was always way at the top, followed by the expected ones like direct and email.

That's why I thought this post by Will from Seer Interactive was particularly instructive:

Answering questions is the main goal, not necessarily where they get the answers.

Again, we'll all have to figure out the marketing-channel fit to our ideal customers.

They won't be every place all the time, but the types of queries they use these different tools for could shift.

Catch that last line...

"Investing in AI search too early (before your customers make the switch) could be problematic."

So if you're too early then you (potentially) wasted a lot of resources.

Is appearing in ChatGPT a vanity metric?

I love ChatGPT and use it almost every day.

I use it for how to do certain processes and for strategic questions and not really for finding particular products or services.

With that out of the way, having your product appear in ChatGPT for "Best CRM software" (or whatever your category) is probably a vanity metric (as of now).

It won't really move the needle.

This could be different for certain developer audiences or highly technical ones, not gonna argue with that.

It may reinforce what your customer is already thinking, but quite possibly it could be frustrating for the user b/c it's not giving them something they don't already know.

Here's me asking about CRM software:

YAWN.

I know about these.

So I went a step further....

...but I wonder how many people will do that?

Go the extra step?

Only the most motivated/frustrated buyers which is usually the type of buyers you want b/c the pain point is intense.

I did this again in another chat, first asking for the best CRM software and then again asking for an obscure one.

It gave me a different response:

All of this is good and satisfying for Nutshell and Less Annoying (lol) but still they won't ever know, no matter how many attribution models they run that I found them through ChatGPT.

There's no way to know.

So again, is it currently a vanity metric? Are we too early?

Overall yes, I think it's currently a very cool, but ultimately a vanity metric to appear in these results.

But there is one case where that "vanity metric" pays off...

the CEO Chat Search.

I remember talking to Tyler Hakes from Optimist about metrics that matter and I said that one metric that could matter is if your CEO searches for something regularly and asks your team about it even if it has no "business impact."

But the CEO search has a lot of business impact on you personally so in that case it could be worth a lot of your effort to appear in those searches if it matters to your boss or manager or CEO.

So if that's the case, here's a very helpful video published earlier this week from Rand Fishkin about how to appear in the LLMs. (tl,dr: digital PR)

Keep going --

Josh Spilker

PS:

Yes, I'm open to new F/T opportunities for marketing, content, and/or SEO.

Most recently, I was at Tettra which had an increase of 700% in organic traffic while I was there and I also directed our work in PPC, Linked (paid and organic) and a YouTube play that I'm pretty proud of.

For contracting-- if you want to scale up your content production, I can bring my system to your team (reply back if interested & I'll provide details)

How you can help?

Thanks!

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