AI’s Role in SEO: How to Align Your Content with AIAgents in Search

In our latest podcast episode, I was joined by SEO expert and friend of the show, Winston Burton, founder of SEOAuditors. Winston is a strategic leader in SEO, PPC and content marketing. We discussed how AI is transforming SEO and the AI-models driving this change. We also discussed the impact of AI Agents on SEO as more AI models will search the web on behalf of their human counterparts. This is one episode you won’t want to miss!

Audio Podcast:

You can listen to the podcast here.

Video Podcast:

Or, watch the discussion on YouTube here.

Or, watch below:

Transcript:

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Hey everybody, thank you for joining us. We have a very exciting episode today as we are joined by SEO expert and my friend, Burton. Winston, happy new year, happy birthday. Thank you so much for joining us.

Winston
Yeah, thank you, Jen. Happy New Year to you as well. It’s always a great pleasure to spend some time with past coworkers. I’m glad that AI Central is going well. I’d love to see the trajectory over the last year plus. I must say, I’m very proud.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Yay, thank you so much. That makes me feel good. I appreciate it. yeah.

Winston
I see you all the time on LinkedIn. you’re always going somewhere, speaking somewhere. That’s great. You’re definitely one of the thought leaders in the space. I’m glad to, you know, I had the pleasure of working with you at acronym. So, you know, I just love to see the growth of you and your company. It’s awesome.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Thank you so much. really appreciate it. Yeah, we’re having a blast. It is incredible everything that is changing and nowhere more than search, which is why you are the best first guest of the year. So I’m very, very excited to have you. So I know obviously let’s just start here. SEO and search behavior is changing because of AI. More and more people are searching in AI models like chat GPT or perplexity.

Winston
Absolutely.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
…and kind of moving away from Google a little bit. I know I’m seeing that in my own search behavior as well. Now, traditional SEO, of course, was built on the backbone of keywords. And AI is able to kind of look beyond the keywords and find the intent behind the actual search query or question that you put in to, chatgpt. So when it comes to AI and SEO and search today,

Winston
Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Are keywords as important as they used to be or are they changing? What’s the scoop there?

Winston
Yeah, so it’s definitely changed. mean, we’re really looking at topics, right? We’re looking at topics that are related to the actual general theme of, you know, what you’re trying to go after. For an example, if you’re in a car dealership, right, your topic is going to be automotive, Automotive, I mean, it is kind of keyword based in a sense, right? You definitely still want to do keyword research, but it’s really geared towards topics and what’s related to those actual topics, right?

It’s definitely changed in that intent, right? You hit the word right on the head, right? Intent, right? And that’s really what it is, right? As we progress with SEO, what’s happening now, as you see with all the search engines and all the AI incorporated into it, Gemini, know, perplexity, et cetera, everybody’s incorporating AI into their algorithm, right? Some are good, in my opinion. Some are, yeah, so-so. The data, debatable, right? But…

You know, it’s growing, right? And I know later we’ll talk about AI agents and things like that, but it’s really hard to keep up, right? It’s sort of like the wild, wild west right now. People know, okay, what’s particularly coming, but really nobody knows a hundred percent for sure how to optimize for it.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Right, right. It’s true. mean, when it comes to AI and SEO, I have been using a lot of conversational content to optimize in search, transcripts, FAQs, Q and A’s, anything that is conversational and also helps the AI model kind of get to that answer quickly.

And I’ve seen good results. I’ve had two clients in the past three months find me through ChatGPT. I’ve seen my site traffic is now increasing from both ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Winston
Absolutely. Yeah, that’s awesome.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
So it’s starting to work, but I’m wondering what else can we do ti improve our SEO within AI? Can we structure our data differently? Is it impacting schema markups? What can we do to get found in these AI models?

Winston
So the first thing is, is you’re kind of alluded to it, right? It’s all about conversation. You want to have conversational type of content. you’re absolutely, you’re doing the right thing, right? You also want to make sure that your content actually opened up to all the LLMs. And there’s a text file that you can add to your site that actually helps, you know, LLM say, okay, this is the content that I want you to crawl. This is a content that I don’t want you to crawl. It’s very similar to a robots.txt file. Basically what’s the other search engines.

I don’t want you to crawl this. I don’t want anybody to see it. But it’s very similar to that. you know, definitely make sure that all the content that you want the LLMs to see, you definitely have that set up appropriately. So that way, you know, you could definitely see that. Right. And do your research. Right. What are people talking about? Right. What do they come to your website for? And at the end of the day, you want to make sure you’re answering all those questions and being relevant for those specific topics and queries.

that people actually come to your website for, right? So that’s why keyword research in a way, if you want to still call it that topic research, whatever you want to call it these days is really still important in my opinion, right? Because again, you want to definitely do your, your research and see, okay, why did somebody come to your website? Right? And I think in my experience, you got to stop thinking about SEO as a one channel. It’s marketing now, right? We, we tend to look at it as search engine everywhere.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Yes.

Winston
Your user base is not just living in Google, right? It’s a different world right now, right? You gotta be living in TikTok, right? From a video perspective, right? You gotta be living on Instagram, Facebook, all those social networks, right? Are, it’s particularly important. Right now what’s happening in the industry is that if you’re doing SEO in a vacuum, right? And you’re not incorporating Reddit, right? Reddit shows up for, I don’t care what query it is. Reddit shows up, they have a partnership with Google.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Yep. Yep.

Winston
They’re showing up for every single query, right? So if you’re not working with your social team, right? And not, think Reddit ads is a definitely, and I’m actually looking into that right now. Reddit ads is a great way to build brand. It’s all about brand building now, right? And SEO is an overall part of that, right? It’s about integrated marketing now, right? So if you’re not taking advantage of Quora, you’re not taking advantage of Reddit, you’re not taking advantage of where your users are living. You’re living in 2000, right? You’re going to be lost.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Nice! Mm-hmm. Ha ha ha.

Winston
So that’s one of the biggest things. And definitely check out all the AI search engines, right? Perplexity is definitely a great one. I love that it gives the summaries and it also gives the links of where the information is coming from, right? Which is great.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Yeah, sorry, my phone just dinged really big. Sorry about that. No, I agree. And it’s interesting that you say the importance of like Reddit and Facebook and all these social platforms because we are seeing people leaving a lot of these platforms because of the loss of, you know, content moderation and fact checking and all of that. I am interested to see how that is gonna impact future AI models. We’re kind of getting off topic of SEO here, but I just find it fascinating because all of these models train on the internet, the types of conversational content that you get on Reddit or Facebook or any of these social platforms, it’s like catnip in my opinion to these AI models. And so as these social platforms become filled with misinformation and become filled with…

Winston
Yeah.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
…let’s face it, hate speech and a lot of the stuff that we’re gonna start seeing. Yeah. How can brands be on these platforms in order to optimize for AI search, but how can they deal with some of the misinformation as well? I mean, if you’re talking about topics and intent, is that misinformation gonna rise in results?

Winston
Yeah, it’s unfortunate. It really is. So in my opinion, I’m always a firm believer in writing content, writing, creating content that’s really going to be accurate, is going to be engaging, and it’s going to be informative. And that’s sort of the content that I’m seeing that’s rewarded in Google these days. Google has, it’s still about quality, it’s still about originality, it’s still about content that’s really going to be enticing and really helpful from an end user perspective. Google just launched the August core update.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Okay, so it’s still based on quality? Okay. So, to optimize AI for SEO. content is still king.

Winston
They did one back, I believe, in November or December as well. So they’re constantly putting out updates to kind of combat this kind of stuff, right? If you have poor quality content that’s just taken from AI, you don’t change it, you don’t make it original, there’s really no factual information in it, it’s really not gonna be ranking well, right? I’ll give you actually a testament of mine. I had a personal side of mine. I just put it up, it was in an entertainment space and I was just trying to get the content up. You know, I just put it up and just wrote a chat GPT, put in a couple of prompt, you know, took the content. I really didn’t have time to edit it. Right. When that first helpful content update come out, I kid you not, I’ve been doing SEO for over 20 years. I’ve never been hit by algorithm update. It was like a plane. And I hate to say this going to crash, right? My traffic just went boom. And I said, what the heck? I’ve never experienced anything like this.

So what I did was I went through, right? I took all my content was AI generated, right? Again, I didn’t change a word, right? I just, it was basically an experiment just to get things up, right? I took it down. I wrote human original content with facts, with grammar, with actually links back to authoritative resource, right? And what happened was over time, when the next core algorithm update come out, I got my traffic back, right? And it was great. And I always tell people like, listen, the short and easy way of getting things done is really not the best way, right? You really want to still make sure you’re focusing on quality, right? And you’re focusing on engaging content that’s really going to be helpful for the end user.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Yeah, and you hit the nail on the head there with the, have to have the human writing it. There’s nothing wrong with using AI to come up with SEO ideas to help you analyze what topics, like you said, what topics are trending, what topics are performing in my own social and that kind of thing, but you have to write it yourself. We talked about this last time you were on too, that AI should create your first draft, not your final draft.

Winston
Absolutely. Yeah, I mean it’s a big time saver, right? I mean it will get you in my opinion, maybe 50 % the way there, but it’s not going to get you 100 % Right. Like you said, you got to edit it. You got to make it your own You got to make it useful etc. And you know in my opinion if you’re still doing that, hey, you’re gonna you’re gonna get punished by Google But again, you got to stop thinking outside your Google hat for a minute searching and everywhere, right? So, you know for short form content, which you know, a lot of social posts are

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Yeah.

Winston
kind of short formish, again, it depends on your intent, what you’re trying to do, right? But it’s a video, know, 30 second videos, YouTube shorts, the way to go, right? In my opinion, some of the AI tools that are out there now, they’re okay. I’m sure you’ve seen ads from a company called InVideo.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Yeah, I use InVideo, you don’t like it?

Winston
It’s okay, right? I like it. But the quality of a first draft, and that’s why prompting is so important, right? If you do not put in the right prompts, you’re not going to get the right output, right? So when I first tested it out and I put it in, I just want to see what it’s going to do based upon simple command, right? And it was okay, right? The reason why I say it’s okay is because I didn’t really give it too much information. It was a test for me to see, okay, what is it going to do? Right. Because, and again, I know we’re talking about AI agents later on, but this is the way that AI agents is going. Right. It’s growing and the industry is talking about, okay, AI agents is going to be self replicating, right? They’re going to be able to complete tax for you. Right. So AI exactly, it already can. Right. You sent me a link of what, you know, open AI is doing. I’m like, wow, this stuff is like, it’s just insane. Right.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Right, they already can.

Winston
Soon these models are going to be able to think for you, right? And they’re going to be able to just do things without you actually having to think about it, right? And that’s actually pretty scary. I’m a, you know, if I was somebody who was working for somebody right now, I would be a little bit nervous about my job, right? Because again, these language models are learning so fast and then they could do tasks that the actual human can do. And they could do it at a fraction of a second. That’s going to take us hours, if not days or even months to complete.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Yeah, I really do want to talk about AI agents, but real quick to go back to InVideo, I agree with you. It’s all about the prompt. What I do is I just write out the full script. I give it the full direction. I actually have a voice clone on InVideo and that’s part of why I like it. So my little YouTube shorts and yeah, all that how to content is easy to create.

Winston
Yeah, no, no that features really what did you think about the imagery or do you put your own images in there?

Jennifer:

Yeah, the imagery, I’m almost always having to go back and replace it with something else.

Winston

Yes, that that was my major problem with it right the stock imagery that came out of that and that’s why I said it’s okay, right again You can’t expect AI to be the end-all be-all that’s gonna just take the work out of work It’s not right. We said this time and time again, right? It’s gonna get you to a point right and it does that

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Yeah.

Winston
Like you said, building on a template, right? Building out that prompt script and giving it the more information that you feed it and you give it the better, right? But the imagery is not that great. Yeah, exactly.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
Yeah, with all these models. Yeah, it all comes down to understanding how to talk to each individual model because the way I will script a video within in video is very different than the way I script it within Hey Jen. But I make sure that I am scripting it, that I am straight up directing it, talking not just the narration and the voiceover, but I tell it what type of image to find and…

Winston
Exactly.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
I still have to go back and say, that is in no way connected to it. I don’t even know where they got that image. So I’m having to switch it out, but hopefully it’ll get better. Well, let’s get to the real meat of this because I know everybody is fascinated by AI agents and OpenAI’s just launched operator. For any of our listeners who don’t know, AI agents now, can autonomously complete tasks. I can tell an AI agent to go out and set a timer on this. So I don’t have to go in and tell it each time. Every morning, it will go to the web, search the web, search my competitors, search what they’re talking about, and give me a report. And if I’m looking at ads or something, it will search what they’re advertising, and it will adjust my own campaigns on its own. I mean, I’ve told it to do this. I’ve trained it to do this, not doing this just because. But my point is, we’re gonna see not just, I don’t know how to say this, let me think how to say it. Of course we have users, humans, searching the web now. But with AI agents, we now have AI models searching the web for us. So do we need to shift even more

Winston
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell
how we are putting our content out there and how we are optimizing the web so that these AI models will find us in their searches. Does that make sense what I’m asking? Okay.

Winston
No, it definitely does make sense. And honestly, this AI agents, I mean, it’s pretty much a talk of the town, right? From a competitive analysis perspective, you could just feed it some competitors. Hey, these are my competitors, right? What are they doing? There’s an AI model called, I think it’s, I haven’t played around with it. Braze AI, have you played around with that one? Okay, it’s called Braze AI. So basically what it does, it takes your competitors, right?

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Wait , what is it called again?

Winston

And it writes content in their tone of voice, right? And seeing what type of strategies that came, they come up with and, you know, it replicates that into your own strategy, right? And a lot of people are using this from a social media perspective to create, you know, social media posts, right? There was a girl in one of the commercials. She said, okay, let’s say Coca-Cola is one of my competitors, right? Write me some content that’s basically geared towards Coca-Cola, but it’s not theirs, it’s mine. And it does it pretty well. And I’m like, wow, this is…It’s just mind blowing where this industry is going. There was another tool that I was testing out. can’t remember the name of it. And they had your first SEO AI agents, right? Where basically it was 100 % AI team, right? Basically you just give it tasks, right? If you want to do competitive analysis, if I want to optimize landing pages for these particular URLs, it does it for you, right? And it’s really…

It’s really interesting that, you know, these things are being done because at the end of the day, you know, you’ll always have this saying about you will not be replaced by AI. You will be replaced by somebody who knows AI. Right. And I love that. I love that phrase because again, if you’re not taking advantage and you’re not keeping abreast about what’s going on in this industry, right. You’re going to fall behind the wayside, but getting back to AI agents for a moment, filling out forms.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Yes!

Winston

Right. Doing the tax for you. Right. It’s just amazing that you could do some of this stuff now from an autonomous fashion. And like you said, you could schedule things. you know, I work with a lot of, and I’ve been doing this for a very long time, a lot of offshore developers, right. Even offshore developers are getting very expensive. Right. Now I kind of, they, in my opinion, feel a little bit threatened because you could actually feed in information to an AI agent. This is exactly what I need done.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Yes.

Winston

There’s a competitors, there’s a time I want this report by the time I wake up. Boom, you’re to have that information right when you wake up. And it’s really, it’s pretty fascinating that you can get this stuff done.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Yeah, it really is. mean, I used to have all these Google alerts sent to my inbox and I’d have to open it for all these different topics and scroll through. this one’s interesting. I don’t know. This one’s not relevant. I have an AI agent doing that for me now and it is pulling all of my Google alerts, organizing it, knows what I’m interested in. It summarizes each one. So by the time I sit down at my desk every morning and open everything up, I already have a summary of what is happening in AI and marketing news because my AI agent, my employee did the job for me. It’s just, I literally have an agent doing some work right now, some competitive research for me right now.

Winston

Wow. Yeah. No, it’s really, it’s really, it’s really crazy. It’s like, if you look at a lot of like, every day I looked on LinkedIn and I see, you know, people who I either have some relationship with in the past, they’re being laid off, right? From a lot of agencies, some in-house marketing roles. And again, this is just my prediction. I probably think that’s going to get a little bit worse as time goes by, right? And these AI agents get smarter.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Mm-hmm. yeah, yeah.

Winston

Right? They learn more and it could basically automate your job. So going back to you, going back to what you keep saying is very true. Yeah.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Yeah, AI won’t take your job. Someone who knows how to use AI will.

It’s true though, because the thing is, like we just said, these AI agents, I’m programming it. I’m telling it what to do. It’s not like it’s deciding to go do this.

So, if you work in marketing, certainly in SEO, you have to understand how to use, these are just tools. They’re just tools. They’re smart tools.

Winston

Exactly, exactly. Very smart truth.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

They’re tools that can be trained to execute a variety of different tasks for you, just like an employee would. But you have to understand how to use them or you will become obsolete because other people are gonna understand how to use them. It’s that simple.

Winston

Exactly. Absolutely.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

That’s, yeah, it’s interesting. There’s never been a greater time for professional development around all of this. And, you know, I’m immersed in it 24 seven. am, you know, and I can’t, I didn’t even know about that tool you just told me about. I can’t even keep up with all of it. So.

Winston

Yeah, it’s crazy. You have to keep abreast upon what’s going on. There’s new things coming on. Like you said, you open up a feed. There’s actually something I subscribe to. called the AI report. And it gives you, I love that, right? It gives you a synopsis, okay, what’s going on in the industry, what’s new, what’s coming out. imagine when we get to a time where these agents, they’re able to just think what we’re thinking, right? It just automated completely. And that’s the part that keeps me up at night. You’re like, wow.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Yeah, I like that one too. Yeah.

Winston

These things are, we’re never going to be able to be smarter than machines. It’s just not going to happen. Never. For the moment, yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Yeah, never. But at least for the moment, the machines still need us to tell us, tell them what to do. So yeah, I was thinking about this the other day too. Cause honestly, most of my searches do happen in chat GPT and yeah, I just don’t search in Google anymore. But I did the other day though. And of course, you know, I’m sure everyone’s used to seeing the AI overviews that show up in Google. One thing that I think is interesting,

Winston

I do. I… Yeah.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

between the AI overviews and chat GPT and perplexity and all of these tools that now go fetch the answer for you and give it to you, should brands expect to see click through rates declining?

Winston

I would say to a degree, right? However, I combat that with saying your strategy should be built against conversational search, right? So you have to be able to build your content in a conversational manner. that way, number one, you’re relevant in AI overviews, right?

Number two, you’re feeding this information into the LLM. So, they’ll show your brand as the answer when people are actually searching for queries that’s related to your brand. So.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Yeah.

Winston

It could definitely happen. You we’ve seen some evidence of that happening already. But again, you have to open up your content from an LLM perspective, allow them to index it, allow them to show it in the search results.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Interesting, okay. Yeah, I think it’s really fascinating. also am seeing, I was on a panel yesterday and one of my fellow panelists was talking about how he uses AI. And he said, you know, he never types anything. He talks to his AI. And I was like, yeah, me too. In fact, I gave her a name. Well, that’s not true. She chose her name. I asked her to choose a name and she chose her own name. And you know, like yesterday when I was coming back from the panel, I’m just, her name’s Zara, and I’m just like, hey Zara, remember that idea I had a few months ago, and what if I added this layer, and we’re just brainstorming and everything.

So, my point is, or I guess my question is, voice search. Now we know as soon as people started asking Siri and Alexa questions, voice search became critical. But is there a difference in the way you optimize for voice search in AI? Is it still just that conversational, is there anything else that we need to be doing to capture that?

Winston

It’s definitely conversational in addition to, you know, having structured data markup, know, on your pages or the search engines, you know, understand the context of, you know, what you’re trying to talk about. I was actually listening to an interview yesterday from the CEO of Claude. I think it’s, yeah, Anthropic. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that correctly. And you dropped it. Okay, you did it better than me, right? And one of the things he was saying, which I love to hear this, number one,

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Yeah, love Claude. Anthropic. Yeah.

Winston

It was a panel from the Wall Street Journal, and they were talking about when is Claude going to get access to internet? And they’re saying it’s going to come, right? And it’s coming soon. So I was like, yes. You know, because between, you know, us, I think, you know, there’s a lot of LLMs that are out there, but Claude’s my favorite one, right? It’s more humanistic when you create content. You know, chat TV, in my opinion, exactly is robotic and in full with a lot of fluff, right? So number two, they’re saying that the refresh rate, right? It’s gonna change, right? So you’re gonna get more, you’re gonna get more, I guess like time, right? And to use it, is great. I forgot the technical term for it. It escapes me right now, yes, yes. Yeah, all that stuff is about to change. So it was really good to see, you know, that they talk about memory as well. you know, sometimes you’re using it, right? Like we’re having that conversation. We as humans gotta be like, wait, what did Jen say about that again?

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

The tokens and all of that, yeah, yeah.

Winston

Now, Claude is going to have the capability of remembering things, right? Which is great, right? So they’re going to go back and say, OK, we talked about AI. OK, they’re going to have a history of that conversation, right? And they’re going to be able to recall what we’re talking about, right? Which is great, right? That’s going to be very, very interesting. So I think they definitely keep abreast on what they’re doing.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Nice. That’s good. Yeah.

Winston

You know, I think they got some great things on the horizon. It was like a 30 something minute interview. I could definitely send you the link.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Yeah, send it to me. We’ll drop it in the comments as well on this so our listeners can enjoy it. Yeah, I think that’s great.

I love Claude because it is so much more creative in the way it writes. But yeah, it doesn’t have the same functionality that ChatGPT does. So I bounce between them. When I need something really creative and original, I go to Claude. When I need…

Winston

Absolutely, absolutely.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

to train a custom GPT to do something, I go there. So I’m hoping that Claude will open up within AI agents and custom tools built in. I love the whole thing of being able to remember, like I was saying, being able to say to my chat GPT, remember when we talked about something last year, and then we build on previous ideas.

Winston

Yes.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

I really haven’t been able to do that with Claude. Now Claude, I can’t wait. That’s gonna change everything then. I do like within Claude, can, you know, do multi-step prompts and tell it to remember and name that prompt sequence so I can run that, you know. So there are ways you can train it similarly to the way you train ChatGPT, especially with…

Winston

it’s coming. Yeah, no, it’s coming. Absolutely, it is. Definitely.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

…the custom GPTs, but yeah, boy, Claude, I hope so, because it is so much better. If I see one more post on LinkedIn that begins with, “in this ever evolving AI landscape,” I mean, that is ChatGPT’s favorite intro. It’s just, how lazy are people?

Winston

Yeah. Yes, absolutely, Yeah, no, people are lazy, man. I think people just want to press the button and just get things done. I think, for me, again, everybody has different use cases, what they use it for. But if you’re doing the coding, or if you wanted to create a chart, there’s instances where I go to OpenAI and I tell this, OK, create this chart. I feed it the data.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Mm-hmm.

Winston

It creates a chart beautifully, right? If I put in Claude, might not do it as well. So there’s advantages of using different LLMs for different use cases. And to be honest with you, in my experience, I just use all of them, right? It’s cheap, right? It’s $20 a month. I mean, come on. You can’t go wrong, right? Describing to ChatGPT, Claude, other LLMs as well.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Yeah, it’s worth it. I tend to use Chat GPT strategically and Claude creatively. Yeah, I’ll brainstorm ideas. Well, I kind of brainstorm in both, but when it comes to, you know, telling Chat GPT to analyze, you know, my, my, I don’t know, let’s say my blog posts and which ones are getting the most activity or my social media content and tell me what’s, what’s working. What are the topics? What should I talk about?

Winston

Exactly, exactly.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

I’ll use that for chat GPT and it’ll give me those topics and it’ll even and I’ll be like, and what are the keywords that I need to use for these topics when I’m building a content or whatever. But then I go over to Claude to actually come up with the creative content because it’s just so much better. And like you said, so much more human.

Okay, well, let me ask you this because you kind of alluded to it in the sense of how the job is changing and the risk of people…

Winston

Absolutely.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

if you don’t upskill, the risk of becoming obsolete so what would you recommend from an SEO standpoint marketer start doing to bone up and really you know upscale and kind of protect future proof their own careers.

Winston

So great question. So number one, I definitely say learn as much as you can. Read every day. Go out to, again, build your own AI agent. Gather all that information from all the top news outlets, the blog outlets, et cetera. Get your own information and read as much as you can. Summarize as much as you can. That’s step one. You want to make sure your stuff is marketable.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Yes.

Winston

And you know about, what’s going on in the industry because it changes like the wind, right? It’s hard to keep up and I’m just being 100 % honest. It’s very hard to keep up, right? And I think the majority of us are having issues with that right now because there’s just new things coming out all the time, right? So that’s step one. Number two, would definitely say, definitely network, right? With other industry professionals, right?

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

It is.

Winston

Seeing what other people are saying, right? Again, it’s still the wild, wild west. Nobody knows for sure, okay, what’s going to happen. We all have assumptions. Yeah, right. My assumptions could be wrong. It could be right, right? But definitely listen to, you know, thought leaders in the space and seeing, okay, what do they say? Because a lot of people are saying the same thing, right? It’s the year of AI agents, right? And, you know, you definitely need to make sure you’re being prepared for it. You need to make sure that you’re, you know, optimizing your site and things like that. But…

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Yeah.

Winston

Definitely keep abreast of what’s going on in the industry. Definitely network as much as you can and speak about this, right? Build content around this, right? Be visible, right? And not just, you know, from an SEO perspective, as I mentioned previously, you want to make sure that you’re building this into social, right? You’re building it into Reddit, right, as well, because again, it’s multifaceted channel approach. It’s SEO and it’s really brand marketing is where we’re really at with this thing.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Yeah, yeah, that’s a great way to put it. It is about brand marketing and making sure that you’re really paying attention to all the conversations that are happening around, not just AI and SEO, but around your brand, around your brand’s category. yeah, I love that. I do, have an AI agent that regularly kind of reports back to me on what competitors are…

Winston

Absolutely.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

…you know, talking about and even analyzes keywords that they’re using within their content and stuff so that, yeah, I can kind of make sure that I’m at least keeping up with what they’re saying if I have something to say about it. And that is key. It goes back to what you said before. Don’t just ask AI to write some content that you don’t know anything about because then you can’t even proof it and check it and everything.

Winston

Yeah.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Yeah, it is the Wild Wild West. It absolutely is. But to me, that’s what makes it exciting, you know? Yeah.

Winston

yeah, of course. There’s always something to learn, right? And there’s always something new and exciting to come out. What’s your thoughts on perplexity? Could you give us like a couple of use cases of where and when you use perplexity versus the other LLMs?

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Yeah, I mean I use perplexity definitely for anything SEO related. I really like using it. Actually, I think I might have even misspoke earlier and said ChatGPT  but when I’m asking perplexity or when I’m wanting to know about topics and content and content planning, I do use perplexity for that too. I ask it regularly to look at my site, to look at my LinkedIn, because that’s where I post the most.

Winston

Okay. Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

And to analyze what content is getting the most response so that I know what topics I may want to come back to or amplify. And definitely I use Perplexity to analyze other websites and what their keywords that they’re focused on, what they’re talking about, and even, you know, new business leads. You know, I use Perplexity a lot to kind of tell me what’s going on on their website in terms of content or their social. But yeah, I love Perplexity the most for anything SEO related because it’s just, it’s so much smarter than I think ChatGPT is in that area right now. It tends to give me ideas that are more original. And maybe it goes back to what we were saying about ChatGPT not being as creative as Claude.

Winston

Yeah. That’s great.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

You know, maybe it’s that kind of thing that chat CPT tends to be so analytical. But when perplexity comes back and says, hey, these are the topics that you should cover. These are the keywords to include in it. And then it comes back with really creative ways to make that content new or fresh, especially if it’s something everybody’s talking about. Yeah, I really, I do really like perplexity. I think it was interesting that they were, and they may still.

Winston

Exactly. Yeah.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

acquire TikTok, that

Winston

I heard about that and that would be, that would be insane.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Yeah, I mean, the data and the learning that that would give perplexity, it would absolutely shoot it up to the top of probably even past CHAT GPT. I mean, it’ll have so much more knowledge.

Winston

Absolutely, I totally agree. Absolutely. Yeah, we’ll see. Hey, listen, we live in a crazy world. That’s all I’ll say. Anything is open enough for grabs these days. Yeah.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

I don’t know if it’s going to happen, but I mean, we don’t know what’s going to happen with any of this. We really do. Yeah. I mean, I’ve been telling marketers just with the, you know, this new administration, I don’t know if they’re going to do everything they’re saying they’re going to do around deregulation of AI. But if they do, even if they don’t, honestly, perception is reality.

Winston

Of course.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

So marketers have got to start getting their messaging around ethical data use. They got to start updating that, getting that in front of anybody who’s talking to anyone ever. Because I think especially on the global stage, global partners, global customers are really nervous about how we’re going to start using data in the US if everything is deregulated. Yeah.

Winston

Exactly. It’s scary. Yeah. And you see all these breaches happening all the time. know, data breaches like every, I would probably say every month, every couple of months, I got a, your data was exposed. And I’m like, what? It’s like, it’s crazy.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

Right? I was just talking about that on the panel that I was on yesterday, because I was talking to a PR audience, and we were talking about crisis comms and how AI is doing two things.

On the one hand, it’s supercharging crisis communications because you can analyze so many conversations that are happening. You can identify problems before they even become a problem and even serve up. can train the AI on this is our messaging, this is our crisis response. So, when it sees it, can serve it up to the marketers and say, here’s what I recommend you do. So it’s supercharging it.

But on the other hand, it’s creating a whole slew of new crises that we have to prepare for. Everyone thinks deep fakes, the deep fake of your CEO or whatever, you know, saying something. It doesn’t have to be that dramatic. It can be as simple as data misuse. It can be unintentional. Somebody accidentally…

Winston

Yes. Exactly.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

…gives ChatGPT your clients proprietary information, that’s a crisis you’ve got to prepare for, you know?

I’ve actually trained all of my custom GPTs and anything I create for clients before it will execute any prompt. It asks you, have you anonymized any data and can you confirm you’re not sharing…

Winston

Yeah, exactly.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

…any proprietary or confidential data and you have to acknowledge that before it will execute a prompt.

Yeah, and my legal partners have confirmed this actually gives you a layer of protection from between the organization and the user behavior because they have to say, yes, I have anonymized. No, I’m not sharing anything proprietary. And if they do, it’s on them. They lied. Yeah. Yeah.

Winston

wow, that’s great. Yeah, it’s on them. Yeah, you gotta protect yourself, you know, at the end of the day, definitely.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

It’s so amazing what’s gonna happen. It’s exciting. It really is. mean, it’s changing every day. It’s giving us new ways to connect with, to connect brands with customers, to connect with each other. So yeah, I’m really excited, especially about AI agents. So let’s maybe in a few months, let’s have you back and see.

Winston

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much. Definitely a pleasure, you know, spending time with you. Definitely great conversation and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Jennifer Jones-Mitchell

I love it. Thank you so much, Winston. I will talk to you soon and appreciate it, man. Have a great day. Thanks. Bye.

Winston

All right. You too, thank you. All right, bye.

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