7 Steps to a Complete Visibility Audit

7 Steps to a Complete Visibility Audit written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Overview

On this solo episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch tackles the evolving world of SEO—and why it’s time to focus less on “rankings” and more on holistic digital visibility. John walks through a practical step-by-step visibility audit, highlighting the key areas every business must review: from AI overviews and Google Maps to reviews, media mentions, E-E-A-T, and content structured for modern search and answer engines. Whether you’re a local business or a national brand, this episode will help you see where you really stand (and what to fix first).

About the Host

John Jantsch is a marketing consultant, speaker, and author of several best-selling books including Duct Tape Marketing and The Ultimate Marketing Engine. He’s the founder of Duct Tape Marketing, a trusted resource for small business owners and marketers looking to simplify and succeed with their marketing.

• Website: ducttapemarketing.com
• Podcast Archive: Duct Tape Marketing Podcast

Actionable Insights

• SEO isn’t dead, but it’s now about visibility—not just rankings. Think: where are you seen when customers are searching, asking, or being referred?
• Audit your presence in Google’s AI overviews: Search your top products, services, and brand questions in Google and see if your business is cited.
• Check your local pack presence: Are you appearing in Google Maps results for relevant local searches?
• Review volume, freshness, and sentiment matter: Google (and prospects) look for current, consistent, positive reviews—especially on Google Business Profile, Yelp, and industry sites.
• Media mentions and authority: Are you being cited by credible sources, industry publications, or local media? These drive authority with both search engines and AI models.
• E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust): Are you demonstrating real proof on your website (bios, testimonials, transparent pricing, case studies, original research, schema markup)?
• Structure content for AI: Step-by-step guides, FAQs, tables of contents, short answers, and conversational Q&A boost your chances of being surfaced in AI and answer engines.
• Add CTAs everywhere: Make sure every key page and content section has clear calls to action—don’t make people hunt for how to contact, call, or buy.
• Use tools and checklists: Tools like Gumshoe.ai and a structured audit checklist will help you track and improve your visibility across all touchpoints.

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

• 00:01 – Why SEO Isn’t Dead—But Visibility Is What Matters
  John reframes the conversation from rankings to real-world visibility.
• 01:35 – Elements of a Visibility Audit
  The step-by-step checklist: AI overviews, local pack, reviews, media mentions, E-E-A-T, content fit, and CTAs.
• 02:25 – Using Tools Like Gumshoe.ai for AI Visibility
  How to check your brand’s presence in AI answers.
• 03:34 – The Power of Local Pack and Reviews
  Why freshness, volume, and sentiment of reviews matter for both trust and search.
• 04:44 – Authority & Media Mentions
  How being cited by credible sources impacts your search and AI ranking.
• 05:45 – E-E-A-T in Action
  Demonstrating expertise and trust on your website for both search engines and humans.
• 07:09 – Structuring Content for AI and Modern Search
  Why FAQs, step-by-step guides, and clear answers are the new keyword strategy.
• 08:29 – CTAs: The Final Visibility Step
  Make it clear and easy for visitors to take the next step.

Insights

“Visibility is the new SEO—showing up in AI, maps, reviews, and media is what really matters now.”

“A single, strong review in the last month is worth more than a hundred from three years ago.”

“AI and answer engines reward structured content—step-by-step guides, FAQs, and short, clear answers.”

“Don’t just rank—be seen, be trusted, and make it easy for people to take action.”

Duct Tape Transcript

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John Jantsch (00:01.154)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guest today. I'm going to do a solo show. I'm to do, in fact, a couple of shows on the whole broad topic of SEO, which depending upon who you talk to today is either dead or has at least a new name. And so I'm going to add to that conversation. SEO is definitely not dead. However, I'm going to add to that conversation that I think we need to think about it differently. It is more about

visibility. That's what we're really trying to get our clients not so much rankings. It's visibility in a lot of the different ways that people are choosing to find their answers. Obviously people are going to AI tools, Google and other search engines are showing them AI answers. So there's no question that that is become a part of the game that we have to pay attention to, but not at the absence of many of the other things. I mean, people still make recommendations. make her

referrals for a lot of businesses. They are definitely going to Google, looking in that map pack and they're looking at your reviews. So there's many things that lead to whether or not somebody's going to go on that journey with you or not. Obviously, one of the steps is about being seen and found, but it's a lot more, it goes a lot deeper than just that element. So what I want to talk about today is actually doing a visibility audit. I'm going to give you the elements that I think are important and talk a little bit about.

how you might think about them and how you might do them as well. And then we'll have a checklist in the show notes for this. So if you want to head on over to Duct Tape Marketing, the podcast and find the show, the visibility audit, you will be able to acquire that checklist as well. So let's get into the steps in there. So the first one is, your brand showing up?

in Google's AI overview. So pretty simple. Go to Google and search the top service products, questions in Google that are related to your company, your industry, your brand, and see if you get cited in any of those. Now, as we go through these, if you and you do have the checklist, you can assign a score to that. Do a dozen or so searches and one to five. How'd you do?

John Jantsch (02:25.902)

There's a tool out there that I've been playing around with that I'll tell you about. called Gumshoe.ai. And it will really give you, I think, some, you can run a report and get the very detailed information about where you show up in AI. All right, the next one, and this is of course, hyper, hyper important for local businesses, and that is your local pack presence. So on the maps, when somebody searches and it's clearly a...

a location based type of search. mean, sometimes people actually put a town in there, but even if they don't, if they're looking for something in a town, you Google knows where they are. So do searches around your same thing, your business, your industry, your products and services, your brand. And do you appear in the Google map pack? So, you know, do if you're happened to be in that town, you can do your service near you. Checklisting star reviews.

you know, optimization, not just of your own, but look at your competitors. What are they doing? All right. Speaking of reviews, volume, freshness, sentiment, all really count. Google doesn't want to see that you've got a hundred reviews one day and then haven't gotten any for three years. So are your reviews strong and recent enough to inspire trust? Because it's not just Google. It's the, know, if you go somewhere and nobody's reviewed a business for four years, doesn't that make you a little...

suspicious, right? So go to Google business profile, of course, but also today, you know, I used to kind of be negative on Yelp and I'm still not a huge fan of Yelp. But increasingly, those reviews are being drawn in by AI. So we need to look at all the industry review sites, look at the count rating recency responses. Again, this can apply for your competitors as well.

Media mentions and authority, a big, big part of the game and showing up today is really about authority and most media sites, like it or not, are seen as authority. So if you get quoted in the local paper, if you get quoted in the Wall Street Journal, and they link back to your website, even if they don't link back to your website, but they mention your business.

John Jantsch (04:44.686)

All the crawlers are now picking that kind of information up and really assigning a lot of authority if the Wall Street Journal talked about you you must know something so Is your business being cited in any credible resources or sources? I should say beyond your own website You can look in Google News You can do podcast searches you can use tools like refs or SM some rush

You know, tools like that to find citations, backlinks, mentions of your brand. And again, right now all we're doing is auditing. These are the key components. Once you have a sense of, or a sense of dread, or a sense of where you stand, these, then we can start talking about how to fix them. All right. You've probably heard people talk about this acronym EAT, E-E-A-T. So it stands for experience.

expertise, authority, and trust. It's basically proof points, especially on your website. So are you adding experience, expertise, authority, and trust in any of your webpages, any of your blog posts? So do you have author bios? Do we have testimonials? Do we have pricing this transparent? Are there case studies? Is there original research? Schema markup also helps identify what those various elements are.

You know, even if you've written content three, four years ago, going back and thinking about, you know, how could we add a case study, an actual example of somebody getting a result that we're talking about here? How can we get quotes from other from clients or how can we get quotes from other experts that would really validate what it is that we're talking about? All right. Content fit for AI. So is your content structured for AI?

There is now a somewhat formulaic way to make your content more structured for AI. So things like lists, step-by-step how-tos, answers. You've probably heard people talk about answer engine optimization. And a lot of times people are going to AI tools and asking very long detailed filtered questions. So the more you can provide these short structured answers to the types of questions that people are asking in conversation,

John Jantsch (07:09.974)

it's totally different than ranking for some keyword term. You might show up for a percentage of searches on a very specific term because you've answered a very specific answer. So FAQs fit right into that as well. So you can again, go back to your content if you've written it before and add a step-by-step how-to, add an overview of what the content is, add a table of contents to the...

Add some questions, even have some of your headlines be questions and then answer the question in there. And then one simple way, let's say you're a modeling contractor and you do kitchens, baths and additions. Well, you hopefully have service pages for all three of those elements that demonstrate you do lots of great work in those categories. But why not have FAQs on every single one of those pages? People have questions.

And so it's very useful content to be answering the specific questions that people have, but it's also amazing search content. It's amazing AI content. So make sure you're doing it. And lastly, what are your calls to action? mean, is it, once somebody finds you, it clear what they should do next? So look at all of your top pages. Are there CTAs to call or to book or to actually buy or to contact you?

give people multiple options to just click on, know, have that phone number up at the very top or have that email or have that evaluation form right there on the above the fold on the homepage so that they don't have to go looking for it, but also in context of when they're actually looking at a service, maybe they're actually down to the part where they're reading the FAQs, make sure you have CTAs there as well. So.

Those are some things that you might want to audit as a visibility type of approach. Like I said, we'll have the show in the show notes. We'll actually have a checklist for this tool as well. So that's it for today. I'm going to do another show pretty soon. Also on the topics around visibility, the topics around how to create content that that will rank for both the search engines. Again, we've got to rank for

John Jantsch (09:28.502)

for algorithms, for search engines, for AI bots, and let's not forget, for people. So thanks for tuning in today. Hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

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How to Turn LinkedIn into a B2B Lead Machine – Anthony Blatner Explains

How to Turn LinkedIn into a B2B Lead Machine – Anthony Blatner Explains written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Overview

On this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Anthony Blatner, founder of Speedwork Social—a leading LinkedIn ads agency specializing in helping B2B companies generate high-quality leads and close enterprise deals. Anthony shares his insights on what makes LinkedIn ads uniquely valuable for B2B marketers, how to avoid common (and costly) setup mistakes, and the latest strategies for leveraging thought leader ads, retargeting, and creative best practices. If you want to get more ROI from LinkedIn and turn it into your top source for qualified leads, this episode is packed with actionable tips.

About the Guest

Anthony Blatner is the founder of Speedwork Social, a top LinkedIn ads agency that helps B2B businesses—from SaaS startups to Fortune 500s—scale revenue with advanced paid media strategies. With a background in software and enterprise sales, Anthony brings deep expertise in targeting, analytics, and campaign optimization.

• LinkedIn: Anthony Blatner
• Podcast: LinkedIn Ads Radio
• Website: speedworksocial.com

Actionable Insights

• LinkedIn’s unique value for B2B: unmatched professional targeting (job title, company, industry, size), active tech/marketing/recruiting audiences, and robust analytics.
• Avoid default settings—LinkedIn’s ad defaults favor large budgets and broad reach; custom, niche targeting is key for B2B success.
• Winning campaign structures:
  • Lead generation with value-first offers (guides, webinars, newsletters) and retargeting.
  • Thought Leader Ads—boosting posts from founders, CEOs, or influencers to drive engagement and trust.
• Case studies and educational posts outperform “hard sell” ads—people want to learn from peers, not be pitched by brands.
• Build audiences by analyzing best customers, identifying true job titles and industries, and layering in skills, groups, or custom company lists for precision.
• Minimum viable budgets: LinkedIn CPCs are higher, so a $15K+ customer LTV is ideal; Thought Leader Ads can get costs down to $1–$2/click when done right.
• Retargeting is powerful: Use LinkedIn’s pixel to reach website or company page visitors with tailored follow-up.
• Lead gen forms vs. landing pages: LinkedIn forms typically lower CPL, but landing pages are required for Thought Leader Ads.
• Clarity > flash: For ad creative, be direct about who you’re targeting and what you’re offering. Avoid untargeted clicks.
• AI is useful for creative testing, but authenticity and personal content still win—especially as LinkedIn’s culture evolves.

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

• 00:50 – Why LinkedIn Ads?
  What sets LinkedIn apart for B2B targeting and campaign measurement.
• 01:59 – Who Wins on LinkedIn?
  The most active industries (tech, SaaS, recruiting, marketing) and how niche targeting works.
• 03:29 – The Big Mistake: Default Settings
  Why most new advertisers waste money and how to structure campaigns for results.
• 04:15 – Lead Magnets & Thought Leader Ads
  The two best-performing B2B strategies right now.
• 06:36 – Boosting Posts and Influencer Content
  How to leverage company leaders (or external influencers) for greater engagement.
• 08:45 – Audience Building & Secret Sauces
  How to go beyond job title targeting for hyper-precise reach.
• 11:44 – Budgeting for LinkedIn
  What you need to make the economics work—and how Thought Leader Ads can cut costs.
• 14:33 – Retargeting & Company Page Visitors
  Why you should pixel your site and retarget warm audiences.
• 15:19 – LinkedIn Forms vs. Landing Pages
  When to use each and why.
• 16:33 – Creative Best Practices
  Why clarity and fit matter more than flash—and how to avoid expensive untargeted clicks.
• 18:38 – AI’s Role in LinkedIn Ads
  Where AI helps, where authenticity matters, and what’s next for the platform.

Insights

“LinkedIn’s real power is in its targeting. You can’t reach decision-makers this precisely anywhere else.”

“Lead with value—guides, webinars, case studies—and build trust before asking for the sale.”

“Thought Leader Ads are crushing traditional company ads; people want to hear from people, not brands.”

“Don’t rely on default settings—custom, precise targeting delivers better results and lower costs.”

“For creative, be clear, direct, and targeted—don’t pay $10+ for clicks that don’t fit your ICP.”

Duct Tape Transcript

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John Jantsch (00:00.924)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Anthony Blatner. He is the founder of Speedwork Social, a leading LinkedIn ads agency that helps B2B companies generate high quality leads, close enterprise deals and scale revenue using advanced paid media strategies. With a background in software and enterprise sales, Anthony has helped hundreds of businesses from SaaS startups to Fortune 500s, leverage, link.

ends robust targeting and analytics for measurable results. So Anthony, welcome to the show.

Anthony Blatner (00:35.564)

Hey, John, thanks for having me. Excited to be here and talk about LinkedIn marketing.

John Jantsch (00:37.382)

So you bet. let's just start the basics. mean, what makes LinkedIn ads uniquely valuable? You mentioned B2B specifically for B2B markers compared to other social ad platforms.

Anthony Blatner (00:50.764)

Yeah, the biggest thing about LinkedIn is the audience. Number one, who visits LinkedIn compared to who visits other platforms. It's definitely the professional audience. Everyone starts by creating their LinkedIn usually when they're entering the job market. So that's where it starts. Some people never updated after that, but a lot of people do along their career path. And it's also evolved into more of a social platform now.

on the business, a lot of it on the business professional side. So number one's audience. And then number two is just pure how you can target people because people start with using it as their resume, their job titles, their companies, those company pages are all, that data is there. It's all filled out pretty up to date. So having those ways of target people based on job title, company, industry, company size, those options like don't exist on.

almost any other platform. it's a great way to be able to target those types of professionals. So if you're a B2B company looking to target a niche professional, then LinkedIn usually has the best options for you.

John Jantsch (01:53.712)

Are there industries or types of offers that do particularly well on LinkedIn that you've seen?

Anthony Blatner (01:59.852)

Yeah, there's a wide variety. I'd say overall it's like who visits LinkedIn the most and it is mostly like the tech oriented industries, the more digitally active industries. Those are the most active. So tech software SaaS is like the biggest one. After that, it's a lot of the marketers out there. So the marketing industry is big and active on LinkedIn. And then past that, a lot of it's...

John Jantsch (02:02.076)

Yeah.

Anthony Blatner (02:25.484)

Like the recruiting industry, HR is very big on LinkedIn because they're doing a lot of that recruiting. A lot of those people, you know, spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. so then you get into industries like that. and that said these days, it's always like interesting when we have a very niche audience and we build it out and size it up, how many people we can find. and then on LinkedIn, but then pass that just depends on the activity level of that audience.

industries that tend to be more of like working in the field industries. They might not be as active. So definitely the tech software and then the marketing folks.

John Jantsch (02:59.25)

So I'll be honest, I have a lot of people that come to me and say, I've tried LinkedIn, I can't make it work. And it's really expensive. I'm guessing they're probably just going on there and just doing whatever the easy button is to set up an ad or something. Are you finding that there's a campaign structure or type that delivers consistently and maybe without spending too much time, we ought to identify kind of the various options on LinkedIn. But are you finding like right now today, this campaign structure really works?

Anthony Blatner (03:29.388)

Yes. So there's kind of two, two ones that are the main ones, the winning ones right now that I recommended most people to start with. but before I get into that, you're definitely right. People get onto LinkedIn, they try the ads platform and they will see much higher CPMs and CPCs than other platforms. So when you compare it with like Facebook or other advertising platforms, like your costs are going to look a lot higher.

John Jantsch (03:54.182)

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Blatner (03:54.23)

And then the challenge is most people will just, you know, if they're not familiar with the platform, they're just going to set it up, use the default settings, click launch, just like they would on Facebook or Google. But a lot of those default settings aren't great for your small to medium sized business. They're more built for enterprise businesses. So you might.

John Jantsch (04:12.498)

Or for LinkedIn to make a lot of money.

Anthony Blatner (04:15.283)

Yes, yes. know, ad platforms are in the business of them, you know, making money themselves. So a lot of those default settings aren't, aren't serving, you know, the small to medium sized business. So we usually recommend changing a lot of those initial settings because somebody might set up a campaign, click launch, and then you then find out your budget didn't reach who you really wanted it to reach due to audience expansion options. And then it didn't serve exactly where you wanted it to. It served more on third party websites, part of the ad network.

of LinkedIn because of the default option. So you spent your money, you didn't reach who you wanted, you didn't serve your ads where you wanted. So of course you didn't get any good results out of it. So that's the most common scenario of what, when we review accounts. So when you use the right settings, you can reach the right professionals and, you know, drive some results. And the main two things right now, the main two things in general that work, the first one is kind of more the traditional one, B2B.

sales takes a long time. So it's not going to be like selling widgets on Facebook, be an e-commerce store. Someone's probably not going to click and buy right away. So you kind of have to plan for the long game. You might to start that.

interaction, you might offer what we call a lead magnet, which is like a guide or report. You might get somebody to sign up for a webinar, sign up for a newsletter. What's that stepping stone to start it on the way to making a purchase? And you might then retarget them to then offer them a demo or a consultation afterwards. first one is lead with value. Lead magnets and lead generation campaigns are always a good way to do that. Those are always, you know, it's kind of a traditional tactic.

The newer one is what we call thought leader ads. And this is just the boosting of posts of people on LinkedIn. So you'll post on LinkedIn from your profile. And as of maybe about a year ago, now you can boost posts from people. So we just see that these perform so much better than a traditional company ad because people are on LinkedIn to hear from other people, not to read ads from companies. They're there to hear from other people. So those do...

John Jantsch (06:20.178)

So walk me through that a little bit. that similar to, would you actually have some sort of arrangement with that thought leader to where they would write a post that's maybe favorable to something you're trying to push, almost like an influencer would, you know, in other platforms?

Anthony Blatner (06:36.245)

Yes. Yeah. And you can set up like, you know, external influencers, but probably step one is you yourself or people in your company or your CEO and founder. that's, that's usually the, it's just called thought leader ads is the name of what the ad unit is. So most companies are going to start with their founder, CEO or themselves. And then.

John Jantsch (06:46.031)

I see.

John Jantsch (06:50.063)

Okay, okay.

Anthony Blatner (06:56.363)

I mean, nowadays, yes, lots of people are setting up arrangements with third party influencers and doing those kind of, you know, sponsored deals. yeah, stuff one is like your CEO, founder. And then like, you know, there's a lot of content. You think about it a little bit differently where it's like, what is somebody going to post that somebody wants, that their prospect wants to read and then starts that interaction. So what we see work very well.

across the board, like different industries have different things that are going to work in different companies, but across the board, it's like a really good case study is a great way to kind of start that because people are on LinkedIn to learn from others and learn how they can do better at their job or in their company. So often they want to read successful case studies by similar companies, similar people. So that's a great content format to start with. So if you have really strong case studies, write that as a

John Jantsch (07:32.018)

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Blatner (07:51.382)

as a post and you do have to write it up like, hey, I'm going to teach you something, read this. And then if you are interested in what we did, you can contact me, you can click here to learn more, and then you can kind of continue the journey from there. we just see that those get so much higher engagement rates and LinkedIn reports on dwell time, which means people are, and we get those stats so we can see people are sitting there and reading that content two to three times longer than a traditional company ad. So it just shows like people are reading this content, they're absorbing it and like that's what we want out of marketing.

John Jantsch (08:21.222)

Yeah. So is there any secret sauce to targeting? You know, you've got all the selects that they give you seniority, company size, job title, all those kinds of things. But I still feel like that doesn't get narrow enough. know, are you, are there targeting mistakes that you commonly see or are there, I guess I'm asking this two ways. How do people make mistakes and then like, how do people succeed? What's the secret sauce?

Anthony Blatner (08:45.163)

Yes, there's a lot of sauces and lots of flavors on LinkedIn. But it starts with number one is that what I told you earlier of like, don't use the default settings because default it says audience expansion and like even Facebook and Google try to do the same thing. I think there's might be a little more clear sometimes, but you know, on LinkedIn, when you're selling B2B, you usually want to target a very specific professional at a very specific type of company. So when you have, when you allow the algorithm to go find similar people, suddenly you've made a couple hops in our

not in the industry and job you want to be reaching. So that's number one. From there, secret sauces are, we usually start with like audience research. Give me a few of your best customers or a few of your target customers. Let's go download their, you know, look at their profiles. What, how do they categorize themselves? What are the job titles? What are the industry's company sizes? And then we'll build a demographic profile from that of who we want to target.

John Jantsch (09:16.144)

Yeah. Yeah.

Anthony Blatner (09:41.014)

And then the way to kind of take that a step further is to get more niche into what are the skills or interests or groups on top of that. When you do Facebook and Google advertising, often you give it a very big audience and you let the algorithm go find the right person for you. Lincoln's algorithm, you know, isn't as advanced as these other platforms, but we also don't need it to be. just, we don't want the algorithm to do any work for us. We want to

We want to have the campaigns reach exactly who we want. So don't give it very broad, very big audiences, give it very small and niche audiences of exactly who you want to reach. And then past that, kind of the most advanced thing that we often recommend is to build your own company lists when appropriate, when you can do that. There's a lot of third party data platforms out there that can be useful, but also if you're, you know, if you're

If you know your industry, you can sit down and often like write that list yourself or have a BDR salesperson write that list. And then can upload that to LinkedIn and make sure you're going after the exact companies you want. Because not always, there isn't always a LinkedIn industry definition for the exact industry you want to reach. And sometimes you have to make your own list.

So, what am I saying?

John Jantsch (11:00.786)

So how do you, okay, no, no, no. think just, you know, we're obviously we've got 20 minutes. We're not gonna teach everybody all the ins and outs, but I think just what you've said at a high level certainly ought to at least put people on notice about how they need to be thinking. So let's talk a little bit about budgets. I'm sure you have some clients that, you know, have been used to paying, you know, $1.17 for a click on Facebook and all of a sudden see $6 on LinkedIn. Obviously it all comes down to ROI.

Does that $6 produce better than the $1.17? How do you make the economics work? How do you do the reporting so that you can make a case for saying, this is money well spent?

Anthony Blatner (11:44.876)

Yeah. So number one, does start with having higher costs as a platform. Just, you do have to have a high enough LTV for that ROI to make sense in the end. So you're probably not going to be selling kind of small widgets or very cheap services. If you do, you would just stick to the organic side of the platform. You probably wouldn't spend too much on ads or maybe your ads are just retargeting people who are already visiting your website. So you use stuff like that.

But yeah, you need to have a high enough LTV for that ROI to make sense. So usually we say you want to have at least 15K of your LTV. So this is more enterprise level software, more, you know, bigger ongoing services. So if you know like, Hey, you know, maybe I do client services and on average, your client sticks with us for a year and we make 20K from that client. Great. You're a good fit.

John Jantsch (12:26.81)

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Blatner (12:38.381)

If you're 10K or lower, 15K or lower, then you just want to be a little more careful of making sure your stats are working out and that you are keeping clients or retaining clients. So that's usually what we say to people. That line I'd say is moving a little bit with the new Thought Leader ads. The other advantage is they get so much higher engagement rate and people sit there and read it to all time like I talked about, which then allows you to get cheaper costs on your ads.

Like every other ad platform, they want to be delivering content that the user, their user wants to engage with that keeps them on the platform. So if your content is getting very high engagement rate, that's a good sign for the platform. They give you a discount on your ad costs. Inversely, if your content does not get much engagement, not many clicks and stuff, then they charge you a premium. So it's all playing that game. So with Thought Leader Ads, does allow you to get higher engagement rates, get cheaper costs, and then

You know, your, your LTV could be lower than if you're having good thought leader campaign running because Hey, maybe you are getting cause like to give you some benchmarks is you said six bucks, but I'd say the average LinkedIn click is like 10 to 15 bucks for a standard company page ad. So that's expensive. Um, so yeah, you just need to make sure your ROI is, is going to work out there with the thought leader ad. If you are getting very high engagement, we see thought leader ads get one to $2.

John Jantsch (13:38.226)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:46.875)

Okay.

Anthony Blatner (14:00.749)

per click and then you are comparable with a Facebook ad and maybe even better than a Facebook ad. Some of the best ones we're running right now are below a dollar per click and are just crushing the Facebook results that they're getting on Facebook because we have the targeting we want on LinkedIn. So kind of all comes down to this.

John Jantsch (14:00.914)

Okay.

John Jantsch (14:18.126)

You mentioned something I want to circle back to you, retargeting. Can you, do they have the similar pixel idea that you can actually put on your website and then you, can you run only retargeting ads? So somebody's come to your website, now they hopped over to LinkedIn, now they're going to see your ad. Yeah.

Anthony Blatner (14:33.355)

Yeah, definitely. The two things are most common is website retargeting. yeah, same pixel, very similar to like Metis pixel. It'll track who visits your website and then retarget those people. And then also people who visit your company page. You can retarget those people as well. Company pages rank very well in Google. So often we'll see, you already have a good amount of traffic to your company page. People are already visiting. Let's start by retargeting.

John Jantsch (14:40.476)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (14:58.172)

So one of the things that it seems like almost all the social platforms are doing, you used to run an ad and you'd drive people to a landing page, but now they've all come up with their own sort of lead capture form and they seem to be encouraging people to use their forms. Do you see that to be true or do you have something that you recommend one way or the other?

Anthony Blatner (15:19.239)

Yeah. So I still, there's still cases for both. We, I do often recommend the LinkedIn forms because you're just, your CPLs are going to be better, much better than having somebody click off to a website, submit a form there. And when you're already paying LinkedIn's higher prices, you just, need that math to make better sense for you. So you do use LinkedIn's forms a lot. You know, your average executive might not spend too much time.

John Jantsch (15:29.904)

Yeah.

Anthony Blatner (15:46.062)

clicking off to a website, reading a bunch, finding the form, submitting it. So let's just make that an easy process. But with the Thought Leader ads, you can't use the native form. So we do still use landing pages a lot with Thought Leader ads. But then again, the benefit of those, you get cheaper cost per clicks. So you can get cheaper cost per clicks to your landing page.

John Jantsch (16:08.434)

How do you handle ad creative and copy? You know, it's not quite the same as, you're not gonna have a reel or a video or something in an ad, I suspect. is there, have you kind of cracked what? And again, having said this, answer, whatever you answer, I know that like it's two months from now, might be a different answer. But what are you finding that's working right now from a creative and copy standpoint?

Anthony Blatner (16:28.982)

Right.

Anthony Blatner (16:33.611)

Yeah. And it's interesting, like LinkedIn continues to evolve and in a way we see it getting closer to like a, to a Facebook and the style of creative people are using. I think just as it matures as a social platform, the more people use it, you know, we see what, what we see, gets human attention on Metta and human attention is on LinkedIn too. So it works on LinkedIn. So we're seeing more of that style start to bleed into LinkedIn. That's also to say like B2B

John Jantsch (16:37.127)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:57.382)

Yeah.

Anthony Blatner (17:01.951)

Creative could always use like some spicing up. So we don't mind some of that You know the the creative style a couple things I usually recommend number one is You don't want to go too far into the Facebook side of things where like Facebook marketing tends to be very flashy get someone's attention draw them in get the click on LinkedIn you want to be more clear and direct who is this for and what are you offering because Even with Lincoln's good targeting, you know

John Jantsch (17:05.362)

Yeah

Anthony Blatner (17:30.161)

You still will have an audience and not everyone in that audience is a perfect fit So you want to you want to reduce the unintentional? Untargeted clicks again back to those expensive prices if somebody isn't a perfect fit You don't want to just grab their attention to get them to click on something that's not relevant And then you paid 15 bucks for that click. So you want to make sure you're getting targeted clicks. We do keep creative a little more Clear and direct under who who are we talking to? What are we offering so that we get the most clear?

John Jantsch (17:40.945)

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Blatner (17:58.628)

get the most targeted traffic that does come through.

John Jantsch (18:01.83)

Yeah, it is interesting. You're seeing the culture, if you will, change a little on LinkedIn. I mean, it used to be people would actually give people crap for posting personal stuff on LinkedIn, you know, and, now it's like, no, it's, it's definitely become a more, I mean, it is a lot of business stuff there, but you definitely see people posting, you know, more personal types of things there as well, don't you?

Anthony Blatner (18:09.929)

Yeah.

Anthony Blatner (18:21.141)

Yeah. And I think, I think there's like a benefit to that too. You know, it doesn't need to be all just business. It's nice to get to know people a little bit. so I do appreciate that type of.

John Jantsch (18:24.006)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm curious how is, AI has impacted every industry. I'm curious how it's impacting what you're doing for folks on LinkedIn.

Anthony Blatner (18:38.893)

Yeah. AI on social is a whole can of worms. I'd say like right now, the thing that LinkedIn does need to figure out is the, there are a lot of AI comments that get left on things. And like, can just, most of the time you can tell like that's an AI comment. That's an AI comment. I know they're taking steps in the right direction. It's a hard problem to solve because, you know, sometimes it's hard to tell when someone's really commenting. Thanks versus AI. Thanks.

John Jantsch (18:55.762)

100%.

Anthony Blatner (19:08.683)

But, you know, think they're, I think they're taking steps in right direction. They just, that needs to be figured out because there is some fluff and spam with that. And not to say it's any better on Facebook, like if anything is worse on Facebook. So there's like the authenticity aspect. And I think, you know, when you're buying something for your business, when you're spending more money, people are going to critique it, analyze it more before they make that purchase. So I don't know, you know,

John Jantsch (19:18.203)

Okay.

Anthony Blatner (19:38.463)

Right now, like AI generated videos aren't super useful or effective because there's no authenticity to that. People don't trust that content. So it doesn't, doesn't work. So it'll, it's interesting, you know, we'll see what happens. Sure. AI copy that's helpful for marketers. It's helpful for everyone to create content. Sometimes you're in niche industries and it's hard to, you know, it takes a lot of time to learn that industry. So you'll use AI to help you write that content or

John Jantsch (19:46.406)

Yeah.

Anthony Blatner (20:06.583)

Ticker content, that's all beneficial. So very early days, we'll see what what happens with it.

John Jantsch (20:12.518)

I certainly like it for testing. If you're trying to run 27 versions of an ad to figure out what's going to work, it's pretty good at doing that type of work. So, Antony, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there somewhere you'd invite people to learn about your work and connect with you?

Anthony Blatner (20:33.773)

You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm the only Anthony Blattner on LinkedIn. And I try to talk a lot about LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn marketing, always sharing best practices. So that's the number one place just on LinkedIn. And then past that, we have a podcast, LinkedIn ads radio that we share all LinkedIn best practices. And then our website speedworksocial.com if you want help with your LinkedIn.

John Jantsch (20:57.306)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Anthony Blatner (21:02.754)

Sounds good, thanks for having me.

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From SEO to AEO: Todd Sawicki Reveals How AI Is Transforming Search

From SEO to AEO: Todd Sawicki Reveals How AI Is Transforming Search written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Overview

On this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Todd Sawicki, founder and CEO of Gumshoe AI, a cutting-edge platform helping marketers navigate the rapidly evolving world of AI-driven search and discovery. Todd breaks down what AIO, AEO, and AI search really mean for marketers, why buyer behavior is shifting, and how brands can optimize for the new era where large language models (LLMs) drive discovery, answers, and conversions. If you’re looking for practical ways to future-proof your SEO and content marketing, this episode is packed with actionable insights and big-picture context.

About the Guest

Todd Sawicki is the founder and CEO of Gumshoe AI, a platform at the forefront of AI-driven search and discovery solutions. With a deep background in digital media, marketing technology, and scaling startups, Todd is a sought-after voice on the future of search, LLM optimization, and how marketers can adapt as buyer behavior and search platforms are transformed by AI.

• Website & Free Report: gumshoe.ai

Actionable Insights

• AI-driven search (AIO, AEO) is fundamentally changing how buyers search, what they expect, and how marketers must optimize—think “training the AI salesperson” rather than just ranking on Google.
• LLMs (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews) are increasingly personalizing answers, using your site’s content, FAQs, product detail pages, and structured data to deliver tailored recommendations.
• AI search users are high-intent and convert at dramatically higher rates—often 2–20x higher than traditional organic or paid search—because they are pre-qualified and further down the funnel.
• Content quality, structure, and freshness matter more than ever; LLMs reward authoritative, updated, and well-organized information, not just what’s most popular or backlinked.
• Updating and repurposing existing content (especially with FAQs, schema, and summaries) is critical—LLMs cite content that has been updated within the last 90 days.
• Competitive insights and personas are key: Tools like Gumshoe can reveal what LLMs say about you, your competitors, and which personas they surface—providing messaging ideas and identifying areas to improve.
• Focus on high-intent, conversion-focused queries (not just top-of-funnel trends) and use AI insights to build better ad campaigns, content, and product positioning.
• Track, measure, and iterate: AI traffic is growing fast—use analytics to see where it’s coming from, how it performs, and how your optimizations are working.

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

• 01:31 – The Rise of AI Search and Zero-Click Experiences
  How AI-driven search is changing user expectations, buyer behavior, and marketing priorities.
• 03:21 – Why Buyer Behavior Matters More Than Technology
  Users are asking longer, more complex, and more high-intent questions, and expect personalized answers.
• 05:18 – The Value of AI Traffic
  Why visitors from AI answers convert at much higher rates—and what marketers should do about it.
• 06:49 – Training the AI Salesperson
  How to “teach” LLMs about your product, and why product marketing and messaging matter more than old-school SEO tactics.
• 08:30 – What Content Do LLMs Prefer?
  Brand websites, FAQs, knowledge bases, and structured content are the top sources cited by AI.
• 09:52 – Why Doing Content Right Pays Off
  How years of quality content and structure are finally being rewarded by AI-driven platforms.
• 12:26 – Content Freshness, Updates, and Repurposing
  The average AI-cited content is only 86 days old—updating and repurposing is critical for ongoing visibility.
• 14:42 – How Gumshoe AI Works
  Using personas, synthetic users, and competitive insights to see what LLMs are saying about your business—and what to do next.
• 20:38 – The Future of High-Intent Search
  Marketers must focus on conversion-ready, long-tail queries and position for the new funnel managed by AI.

Insights

“AI-driven search means you have to train the AI like you’d train a salesperson—answer objections, provide detailed info, and position your product for each persona.”

“Content quality, structure, and freshness are the new currency—LLMs reward the right answers, not just the most popular ones.”

“Focus on high-intent, conversion-ready queries—AI search gets users further down the funnel, and marketers need to adapt their messaging and content to win.”

“Analytics prove it: AI-driven visitors stay longer and convert more. Optimize now and track what’s working as AI’s role in discovery grows.”

“Competitive intelligence and persona insights are critical—know what LLMs say about you and your competitors to improve your messaging and positioning.”

Duct Tape Transcript

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John Jantsch (00:02.52)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Todd Sawicki. He's the founder and CEO of Gum Shoe AI, an innovative platform at the forefront of AI-driven search and discovery solutions. With a background in digital media marketing technology and leading high-growth startups, Todd is known for his deep insight into changing landscape of search. We're going to talk about SEO, we're going to talk about AIO, AEO, all the

Other rows that are out there.

Todd Sawicki (00:33.81)

As long as we don't call it GEO, what, you can tell the person who came up with that had no background in marketing because I'm sorry, the minute I've been in the paid landscape, the minute you see the letters GEO, you instantly think of geo targeting, hello people, the last thing we wanna do is make anything more confusing than it might otherwise be. So, my little soapbox for today.

John Jantsch (00:48.622)

Sure,

John Jantsch (00:54.86)

And so with that, with that Todd's on the show. So welcome Todd. So let's, mean, I kind of laid that out a little bit. You know, you've created a tool that is really taking advantage of some of the changes that are going on in marketing today, especially around search. So maybe give a high level kind of in your view, let's start with the basics. All this stuff we're hearing about.

Todd Sawicki (01:10.609)

Yes.

John Jantsch (01:21.41)

GEO for one, AIO, AIO, know, all those kinds of things. I mean, what does it all really boil down to for the typical marketer or typical business?

Todd Sawicki (01:31.374)

It is a it is a good question. So I think we all woke up a year ago. And with the rise of zero click searches with AI mode in Google search taking off, and we began to see Google traffic starting to decline. And at the same time, if anyone was sort of looking at their, like GA four analytics or whatever they're using, they started to see, look, I'm getting this new basket of traffic from chat, tbt and others. And so AI

John Jantsch (01:50.478)

Mm-hmm.

Todd Sawicki (01:58.706)

and sort of looking at that. so the AI search is taking off. And so as a marketer, suddenly you had to start paying to this attention, this new thing called AI search. And so fundamentally, we look at it as, you know, marketers want to understand what the hell are LMS saying about me. And then from a product standpoint, we like to say yes, we help marketers understand what LMS think about them and their brands, and ultimately what to do about it. And I think that's one of the interesting things is there's a lot more you can do about it, because AI search is a

fundamentally different platform and approach than traditional search and really in many ways I think a search is solving a lot of the problems we've been complaints as end users we've had about traditional search and then there's downstream applications for marketers and how to think about how you work with those platforms as a result.

John Jantsch (02:45.262)

Well, and I think you're hitting on one of the things that I try to get people to understand. Everybody always goes, oh, we've got these new platforms. Um, but what they fail sometimes to recognize is that the buyer behavior is changing because of these new platforms and how people, what their expectations are, how they now go to, even to Google. mean, I'm seeing people do this. We used to put it in these nice little compact searches. Well, I'm seeing people put in these very long searches now, very high intent, you know, very filtered almost because they know they can get AI overviews and things. And I think that.

Todd Sawicki (02:57.202)

Correct.

Todd Sawicki (03:09.039)

Exactly.

John Jantsch (03:15.222)

change is really what we really need to adjust to, right? It's not necessarily the technology, is it?

Todd Sawicki (03:21.778)

I agree users have fundamentally changed and you probably hear this even anecdotally amongst your friend sets. Like you start kind of experimenting with chat tpt or perplexity or whatever it is and you're like you ask it a real deep question that you know is very frustrating to get answered in traditional search and you would have to click through 10 things and it was just a pain in the ass and took a lot of time and where now you get a pretty good answer most of the time right away and it fundamentally changes the experience. I mean we're seeing dramatic thing changes especially in complex areas like b2b type searches.

It's a great use case when you're researching very technical things. You're researching like more long tail areas for traditional search work wonderfully in the world of AI. And I think the other thing that traditional search really did a poor job of, and it really shows up in AI search is AI search does a phenomenal job of personalizing its answers for you. And that is one of the things that

in even in terms of our own product and platform, but the implications of that are very interesting. And so as an end user rate, would you imagine think of the LM as you walk into a shoe store, and there's a wall of 500 pairs of shoes behind that salesperson as you walk in, and the LM is the salesperson. And so you're trying to know what's the right pair of shoes? Well, Google you do it doesn't really ever answer I need a new pair of shoes, you would never like Google just would struggle with that. But with

John Jantsch (04:43.488)

Or give you the most popular shoes or whatever.

Todd Sawicki (04:45.488)

Or give you the most popular one. Exactly. Just give you the most popular one. But the LLMs are really trying to understand, are you a runner? Are you a hiker? you have an account, you register, they're building profiles of you, interestingly enough. Right? The minute you put your email in, it knows where you work. It knows what you're affiliated with. And so as a result, your users are seeing that there really, there's a value for that relationship between you and the LLMs. It learns more about who you are. It discovers things. It's trying to personalize the answers. And so it therefore can give you a better answer and really help you in a way that

Traditional search never quite got to.

John Jantsch (05:18.252)

You know, and one of things that I get business owners pretty excited about, because a lot of them are going, is all hype or like, don't, you know, do I got to really do this or am I really going to get AI traffic or not get AI traffic? So all these questions and all I do is show them analytics. and I am able to demonstrate that to them, the people who come from AI stay on your site 10 times longer and convert seven times more than your paid ads, more than your organic traffic. And a lot of that, think is just what you talked about because.

Todd Sawicki (05:43.602)

Yup.

John Jantsch (05:47.5)

they are doing the filtering themselves. And if they get to your website, it's because you had what they wanted. Right.

Todd Sawicki (05:51.258)

Exactly. They're pre-qualified. Right. No, and we're seeing stats on the B to C. We typically see a little bit less than seven X, probably more in the range of kind of two to five X increased conversions on the B to B side. We're seeing increased conversion rates up to like 20 X better. Cause again, they're down the funnel. Cause right. When I think about, you think of from a marketer standpoint, let's think about the classic marketing funnel. There's discovery, then consideration, then conversion.

Google managed discovery and then handed you off to websites to manage consideration like your own website some third-party writer whatever it might be but AI is trying to do not just discovery but manage through the Q &A process consideration as well and then hand that user off for conversion and So that's why you see these higher conversion rates. They're further down the funnel AI has managed that now from a marketing standpoint You're now your challenges. I need to manage AI differently because now suddenly it's it's the one selling my product

John Jantsch (06:49.09)

Yeah, yeah.

Todd Sawicki (06:49.35)

And I think that's the fundamental shift here as a marketer is you have to going back to that, that shoe store analogy, that element as a salesperson means you're going to have to manage that person, right? That's not your job. Whereas SEO, and I think this is one of the other big changes. SEO is a very technical thing, like link building. And remember that the just the ridiculous debate we had for years about is it a sub domain or a folder? Right? Is that marketing? No, that's a very technical thing. And you know, any non technical marketer, whenever that discussion and by the way,

for those who don't pay attention that went on for years like it was like a red versus blue sort of battle in the online marketing sphere. And but a very technical thing not marketing based at all. And I think the differences for LLMs, it's much more of a, oh, how do I teach the LLMs what to say about my product, just like I teach, you know, a salesperson at the front of Dick's Sporting Goods store kind of the same way. And so it's now it's much more of a product marketing exercise than it ever was with traditional search. And I think that's the other thing is

You're going to have to think about how you talk to the LLMs and how you market to them.

John Jantsch (07:50.35)

Well, and this gets at the crux of, you know, a good salesperson is trained on, know, all the objections of, you know, all the questions they're going to get. Right. And so now all of a sudden our content has to be answers.

Todd Sawicki (07:57.222)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Todd Sawicki (08:04.722)

Correct? absolutely. So one of the things, so Gumshoo as a platform has been, we publicly launched it about six months ago and we've already worked more than 3,500 marketers have signed up. We've already generated millions of prompts on behalf of marketers so they understand what elements say in response to these prompts. And as a result, we're able to analyze those response. think it's like 10 million answers that we've analyzed.

John Jantsch (08:29.112)

Mm-hmm.

Todd Sawicki (08:30.416)

And then you really, you start to see patterns in what they're doing, but they absolutely want you as marketers to provide them kind of sample question answers back. if you, of the fascinating things about LLMs is they actually link, they prefer the number one source that they link to for product information are brand websites. And then within that, they link to product description pages or PDPs or product detail pages, whatever description you want to use, like the PDPs, FAQs,

John Jantsch (08:50.616)

Mm-hmm.

Todd Sawicki (08:59.896)

knowledge base articles, how to sections, they love that sort of informative how to answer questions for them. And they use that as a guide. Now they process their own way, they kind of regurgitate it in their own way, but they want to use that as a basis. So you're right, you're gonna you have to just like you train that salesperson on Rude Q &A, you're doing the same thing now with the models, which I think is interesting to marketers, when they start kind of like seeing and understanding like it's not a marketing exercise, and not a weird technical link building sub domain folder esoteric discussion anymore.

John Jantsch (09:04.738)

Yep. Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:25.292)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and one of the things that we have seen, because, know, I've always believed that, that you do content, right. You're going to get rewarded by the search engines. Well, we've been doing content, right. In my view, you know, hub pages, structured content, FAQs, table of contents, summaries, schema, you know, we've been doing all that stuff because it was good content marketing. well,

Todd Sawicki (09:37.244)

Yes.

John Jantsch (09:52.258)

the LLMs and AI are actually rewarding us for that work right now because we ranked high in Google. We are now ranking higher in AI overviews and in chat GPT. Are you seeing that as well?

Todd Sawicki (10:06.354)

So if you don't have content online, it is hard for AI to even know you exist. And so that's sort of step one. You'd be surprised at the lack of content out there. It's, know, all right, well, you sell it. You sell these programs. But I think it's because everyone probably thinks they've all, everyone's done content marketing. It's not always the case.

John Jantsch (10:12.526)

Well, yeah.

Well, no, no, I would not be surprised.

Yeah. Yeah. I always love it. I always love it when we go to work with a new client and they say, yeah, well, our SEO firm is doing this for us. And it's like, what are they SEOing? Like, there's no content there.

Todd Sawicki (10:35.83)

There you go. Exactly. There's no content. There's nothing else. And so the differences here you mentioned, like you generated content that the difference here though is there's a subtle, you know, benefit and you kind of address this, I'm gonna call it what you said, which is you're getting rewarded. But what's interesting is Google, it was rewarding popularity, not necessarily the best content and the most authoritative content. What LMS are doing is doing a much better job of rewarding the correct content. So

It's sort of like, and we have a good stator on this, is, we look up the traditional Google rank of all the URLs that are cited by AI and its answer, and its justification for its answers. The traditional Google rank is below 21, 50 to 90 % of the time, meaning page three and beyond. So it's pulling out these, so it is looking at some of those that traditionally link to content SEO, but it was always these deep links. And the problem with traditional searchers,

John Jantsch (11:18.658)

Well, yes.

Todd Sawicki (11:28.602)

is, you know, we kind of generically use the stat one out of 100 people go to page two on Google, one out of 1000 go to page three, one out of 10,000 go to page four, and no one goes to page five. And that's very exactly how the dead bodies but AI to my stat 59 % of the links they surface are in that that sort of buried into because they have AI or machines, they have infinite patients. So what they're good at doing is finding authoritatively correct like we like to see canonical information. And then and so as a brand,

John Jantsch (11:38.734)

Yeah, that's where you hide the dead bodies, right?

John Jantsch (11:51.15)

Yeah.

Todd Sawicki (11:58.416)

all that work that maybe struggled to get surfaced in Google, because it just wasn't as popular or using out to people buying links. Now, now they're really to your point, really rewarding good content, good highly valued structured content. And so it's sort of like, it's sort of the it's paying off 10 years of work, finally. And so the people who may be struggled to get some of that popularity in Google, it is absolutely paying off in AI overview, AI search and AI overviews and things like that in a way that you always prayed and hoped for as a content market, like your day has come.

John Jantsch (12:07.842)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:13.964)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:26.35)

Yeah

Todd Sawicki (12:26.716)

Producing great content is a payoff and it's happening. And I think that's really fascinating here, which is people are like, with the rise of AI Slop, no, the models want good content and they're good at deducing what is good content. AI Slop will not get ranked and you have to, they want authoritative information. And so that's content that will get ranked in AI search and then drive traffic today and tomorrow, agentic purchases, right? You're ultimately trying to drive some of that conversion more and more that AI will be driving that itself. Like Perplexity's browser will load a cart for you today.

Right, it's loading products it's picking on your behalf into that. So that future is coming fast and furiously. And so I think that change is sort of fascinating to see when you look at what's happening. Now, the other stat about what's really fascinating here is, okay, what if I don't have been produced 10 years of content, am I screwed? Well, one of the other facts that we've seen is that the average age of a cited piece of content

is only 86 days old in AI search. And that's falling 10 to 15 % quarter per quarter. Now there's a caveat there, which is it doesn't have to be originally published, it just has to be updated. Like the AI will look at content that's older, but as long as it's been updated, and you note that that updated date, it will value that as well. And so and that 86 days is falling 10 to 15 % every quarter. So today it's 86 days, next quarter is gonna be 78, 70 to the quarter after that, and see you get faster and faster.

So you're gonna have to be doing a lot more work around content, maintaining it, updating it. It's not a publish once and walk away model anymore. It's gonna be a constant refresh. And so, the good side of that is you're just starting out. We've definitely seen this with people where you can impact the results well within a 90 day window where traditional search that was almost impossible. And so there's a definitely, don't wait, get started. Hire John and his team.

John Jantsch (14:12.504)

But again, yeah, well, but I was also going to say that another best practice for years has been repurpose your content. And so, I mean, I now it's like repurpose your content in a specific way, you know, add FAQs, you know, to that content, right? But, but I think that's what you're saying is should be very helpful for those people that just kind of wrote the hundred one off blog posts. It's like, no, now go back and make that pay. Let's talk specifically.

Todd Sawicki (14:28.146)

Correct. Right.

Todd Sawicki (14:39.94)

Exactly, exactly. It's fascinating to kind of, you know, watch that all happen and come to fruition.

John Jantsch (14:42.742)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's talk specifically about gumshoe. I know that's what you want to talk about. But first off, I have an account. I've played with it and it is in seemingly incredibly complex what you've built. And so my first question is, my first question is, where did that come from? Are you a mad scientist or did you hire people or how did you develop that? Because

Todd Sawicki (15:02.844)

Well, thank you.

Todd Sawicki (15:10.77)

So we have a team, right? We have a team. I've been in digital marketing tech for 20 years in my career and got involved in, and really the common theme has been around customer acquisition as it turns out. And I even view the purpose, we only care about AI search as marketers, ultimately because it can drive business, right? It'll drive traffic and revenue, right? So fundamentally it's a, and so I 20 years ago got involved in toolbars and search. Then I got into the social marketing landscape, just as that was taking off like 2007 to,

John Jantsch (15:28.334)

That's right. That's right.

Todd Sawicki (15:39.986)

to 2012 and then got into paid and built a DSP. So in the programmatic space and then was playing in ecommerce and Shopify's ecosystem, you building customer acquisition apps in there and then ultimately transition here. And it was sort of the space of a year ago was talking to marketers. And again, the beginning of this conversation around AI search and the rise of that. And if you're a marketer, and suddenly the channel you're relying on Google search falls off a cliff. for some key keywords, I heard

30 60, even 90 % declines in traffic, even on the paid side. Like it just Google is sacrificing even paid traffic and on some keywords. So that's an existential change in the landscape. And then as we started thinking about this in terms of working with marketers, you're like, well, you know, to what I said earlier, gumshoe helps brands understand what elements think about them. And then what to do about it. Well, that where does that come from? Well, if you're a marketer, you can't just log into chat tpt and find out what it's saying to you because

John Jantsch (16:12.813)

Mm.

Todd Sawicki (16:37.508)

as you I don't know if any everyone should go watch the season premiere this fall's episode from Boulder natives, you know, the creators of South Park, the first episode this year, the main one of the main characters dads is like falling in love with chat tbt because all it does is flatter him. And it says like every idea he has is wonderful. And it's a great and he's got some he's trying to start a new business. And his wife gets all pissed off because he's constantly going to ask chat tbt and says see I'm right, you know,

John Jantsch (16:54.285)

Right.

Todd Sawicki (17:05.426)

his wife's name is Sharon, see I'm white Sharon, chat TBT says I'm right. And he's like, No, it just says that to everybody. And so as a marketer, you you can't just log in and ask chat TBT what it thinks about your business, because it's going to kind of lie, it's going to flatter you, it's going to say the most optimal thing it can because it by the way, the minute you put your email in, it looks you up on LinkedIn, it knows it knows where you work, it knows your products, it's no it knows how to answer things. And so then you realize as a marketer, I don't care what LM say to me, I say, I care what it says to my target customers.

John Jantsch (17:17.666)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (17:31.832)

Yeah. Yeah.

Todd Sawicki (17:34.01)

And so the way that we built our product was around how do you help marketers understand what it's really saying to its customers? And so our point of view as well, how do we get in the shoes of that customer? And so what we do is we build these personas which become synthetic users. right, so those are what are asking prompts in the models. We have a better understanding of how they, how will they talk to, how the models speak to these different, different customers and those insights of like, okay, here's how it, and by the way, the variety of answers between one type of

persona and another is fascinating. And they're absolutely customizing their answers. Like, John, you've seen this, right? Just one customer will say, like, just imagine you're a hiker, you're going to get a different answer for the pair of shoes than if you're a marathon runner. And so that makes rational sense as a marketer kind of understanding this nuance and how it's treating different types of end users using AI search is sort of a fascinating insight. And it's cool just to look at the answers and see what they say to different things. So that's my point about marketers and the messaging and seeing how it talks to different people.

John Jantsch (18:06.594)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:31.374)

One of my first observations that kind of blew me away frankly was I just put in a company's URL, I think is all I did. yeah, and it came up with, I want to say eight, maybe it was a little more than that personas. And they were, we had already done that work, but they were very spot on, maybe even a little better descriptions. And what I found was interesting was it actually,

Todd Sawicki (18:39.324)

Correct, that's what you start with. You start with the URL, correct.

John Jantsch (19:00.342)

All the analytics and search was great, but we actually got some messaging ideas just from that part of it, and that wasn't even the intent.

Todd Sawicki (19:10.652)

Well, and that's what I mean about it. you know, it's, was talking with a head of product marketing earlier today, and I'm like, this is product marketing's moment, because AI search is fundamentally a product marketing exercise. And it's a positioning exercise. And when you read those prompts and answers, we hear that all the time, because what we help you on what we ask questions and basically ask questions around product areas for your business. And those will give you a set of responses like, we recommend these three companies or these eight companies or these five. And then you see the rationale for those

recommendations. And that's great marketing, right at feedback. It's it's what's our positioning, what's our competitive positioning, you show this to any product market, like, oh, my god, this is like my competitive messaging framework, which you'd by the way, what you describe john a itself serve, can do this yourself, anyone can enter a URL of a company to get this. And in like 10 to 15 minutes, you're walking away with a really cool understanding of your products position in the marketplace, at least the marketplace of AI search, which is meant to be a broader perspective of the world, obviously.

But it's no, hear this all the time. It's fascinating. Like it is a total rabbit hole for anyone who cares about commutative or comparative messaging.

John Jantsch (20:13.742)

Yeah. So the other observation is that, you know, lot of people that are talking about losing search traffic, it's for, let's say I'm a remodeling contractor. It's they're losing traffic for trends in kitchens, right? Which was not somebody that was going to buy anything, right? They're losing a lot of that traffic because they'd written a great trend article for 2025, right?

Todd Sawicki (20:37.138)

Correct.

John Jantsch (20:38.37)

But that was not going to ever convert. But what's interesting from what you're unearthing is you're unearthing all these really high intent searches. I mean, the search string is such that it's like, yeah, that person's looking to remodel their kitchen. And I think that that's what marketers need to really focus on is that, forget about the, I mean, we do still have to do a lot of things to create awareness. But what we really need to focus on is high intent right now and capturing that search.

Todd Sawicki (21:07.138)

That is absolutely, I think a change, which is you're going to go a little bit more down funnel. And you because you I think you can with AI search problem with Google is all those searches were so high level and so generic. It was hard to, to you're right, the lack of long detailed searches in Google meant it was hard as a market, you couldn't really target that sort of bottom of funnel activity. But AI is kind of all about that. And even if you ask a generic question, AI will follow it up with a more specific like they want to, they want to know which direction they need to go. There's a back and forth that never existed in Google search.

John Jantsch (21:16.962)

Yeah, right.

Todd Sawicki (21:35.878)

that absolutely exists in AI. And you anyone who's experienced this, when you go to the models, it'll it'll ask for follow ups, it'll clarify things, it'll make sure it understands what you're talking about. So that it's its goal is to give you the very best answer possible.

John Jantsch (21:41.932)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (21:48.686)

Yeah, it wouldn't have been great. You go to Google and say, no, that answer was wrong. Fix it, right?

Todd Sawicki (21:52.324)

Exactly, we all wish we could like that search, you'll get some results. You're like, that is a terrible right link. And now with all the like the amount of Google searches that are so link baited to death. I love to get the analogy of in a lot, you know, I said earlier, the AI search is fixing a lot of things wrong with traditional search, like how many times in our lives like you bought like a new TV, and I just need to know the damn matter the width of it. So will it fit on my mantle or not? And you do a search and like you get every link is 10 best this or 10 best that or trends of

hot TVs this Christmas like I just need the dang measurement. Come on, Google.

John Jantsch (22:23.854)

or a link to Amazon that's not even a TV. Those are my favorite. So I'm sorry, we got geeking out here on like all the under the hood stuff. And I'd love it you could just like give us the two minutes feel what is gumshoe? How you know, how does it work? How does somebody try it out?

Todd Sawicki (22:28.187)

Right!

Todd Sawicki (22:42.556)

So at any market, it's a publicly available and you can try it out for free. It is, you can generate a report about your company. You go to it, as John said, you're going to enter your company's URL. And then from there, what we're gonna do is again, show you what LMS think about your business and product. You're gonna select a product that'll generate personas and then we'll generate the prompts that represent the activity that users are having with AI. And then...

run a series of real-time conversations, we turn those personas effectively into synthetic users. That's kind of a buzzy word. Synthetic is the ultimate now AI buzzword. It's a simulated user, it's a synthetic user. And then that user will, yeah, exactly. It's better than that. We'll have a series of conversations with the LLMs. We kind of create those and then we analyze the chat activity and kind of package that up in a way so that you can help identify areas, topics of these types of prompts where you're doing well or you're doing poorly.

John Jantsch (23:14.648)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (23:18.83)

It's better than bot though, isn't it?

Todd Sawicki (23:38.736)

And then the next step is we also allow you to sort of then generate the content based upon, you know, where your strengths and weaknesses are that through our platform that you can then host on your site. And the way to think of it is, is your personas are your predicted customers, who the elements think are your top customers, and then they want instructions, the content you generate is intended to be or write on your own, is intended to be the instruction set back to the models. Okay, for these customers, here's the features and benefits that we believe appeal to them and why they want to pick our products.

And ultimately, that's going to send traffic back to your site. And then can help analyze that to understand was it good traffic, bad traffic, what have you. And so the goal of our point of view is to say, again, how do we help you understand what I'm thinking about you and then what to do about it, right? You're ultimately how do you capture as much revenue or as much referral traffic as possible from the LLMs. And so that's the way Gumshoe works. You can go to gumshoe.ai. They said you just start with the URL. And in 10 to 15 minutes, you're going to walk away with sort of insights about what you can do. there's, again, you don't need an inter credit card that's just freely available. Everyone can create an account. And then

The way we work is it's not a subscription based a time based. If you want to rerun a report, you want to run it again, like in a weekly or monthly basis, kind of track how you're doing, you would then sign up to pay an ongoing basis. And so it's just based upon how often you want to sort of leverage the platform and use it. That's the model. So feel free once you generate a report, whether it's a free one or a paid one down the road, it's available to you for as long as we're around as a company.

John Jantsch (25:03.266)

Yeah. And one of the things that I failed to mention, you didn't mention either is I thought does a really good job at, at, identifying competitors, as well. Yeah.

Todd Sawicki (25:12.466)

Correct, because what we'll do is in those answers, we're going to get multiple companies products recommendations and we surface that to know your competitive great great point, John, you know, your competitive standing, our competitors doing better or worse than you in AI. And that's obviously often a key indicator. And then we'll help you analyze where they did better versus you. So you know, what's your point about messaging, right? And the product messaging, like what features of a competitor are winning versus ours?

where is their positioning better? Is it something else? Or and that's sort of a great insight is where all the other companies getting mentioned alongside you, and then we'll help you identify also, what were the reasons like what led to the models answering the way they did? Like what citations and sources so if you want to do outreach from a PR standpoint, you can we help you identify the places you should be going and talking to, or even read our core threads you should be posting on. We now have a feature where we'll we'll give you a draft post for Reddit and Cora.

John Jantsch (25:49.816)

Yeah.

Todd Sawicki (26:05.498)

Again, but it's based upon, you know, strengths and weaknesses that we identified and said, here's the things you should be talking about more to help you get more visibility to AI. And so that's sort of the goal here is how do we help you talk back to AI. So you're feeding it the features and benefits of your products. So they'll talk about your products next time instead of someone else's.

John Jantsch (26:26.878)

I'm sorry to sound like an ad for, for gum shoe, but you know, we actually took a lot of this long tail searches and built some ad campaigns around, around them as well.

Todd Sawicki (26:35.792)

We have heard that because the persona piece is great for that, like audience targeting and things like that. No, no, we've absolutely heard that, that there's some interesting crossovers about this. Once you realize it's messaging based, there's a ton of things you can do with this data. It's really, I'm not kidding about being a rabbit hole. Like you start reading the chats that we generate and surface. just, it becomes, it's really fascinating to kind of see what's being said in a way that you only ever got through focus groups or weird surveys before. And now and again, it like.

15 minutes, getting some really interesting insights. can then spend a lot of time diving into and learning from in a way that we just never had access to before.

John Jantsch (27:10.99)

Well, we've gone over time. appreciate you. Take it a few moments to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast is gum shoe dot AI and Todd again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Todd Sawicki (27:24.914)

Thank you very much. Appreciate the time and attention.

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