{"id":1193,"date":"2025-09-25T20:02:29","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T20:02:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.agencywebdesigners.com\/?p=1193"},"modified":"2025-10-02T14:32:57","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T14:32:57","slug":"from-seo-to-aeo-todd-sawicki-reveals-how-ai-is-transforming-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.agencywebdesigners.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/25\/from-seo-to-aeo-todd-sawicki-reveals-how-ai-is-transforming-search\/","title":{"rendered":"From SEO to AEO: Todd Sawicki Reveals How AI Is Transforming Search"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/ducttapemarketing.com\/ai-search-seo-todd-sawicki\/\">From SEO to AEO: Todd Sawicki Reveals How AI Is Transforming Search<\/a> written by <a href=\"https:\/\/ducttapemarketing.com\/author\/johnjantsch\/\">John Jantsch<\/a> read more at <a href=\"https:\/\/ducttapemarketing.com\">Duct Tape Marketing<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!-- Insert Audio Player Here --><\/p>\n<p><!-- Title will be added via WordPress template --><\/p>\n<section><em>Listen to the full episode:<\/em><\/p>\n<h2><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\" wp-image-84275 alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.agencywebdesigners.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Todd-Sawicki-1.png\" alt=\"Todd Sawicki (1)\" width=\"176\" height=\"176\" \/>Overview<\/h2>\n<p>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\u2019re looking for practical ways to future-proof your SEO and content marketing, this episode is packed with actionable insights and big-picture context.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section>\n<h2>About the Guest<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Todd Sawicki<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Website &amp; Free Report: <a href=\"https:\/\/gumshoe.ai\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">gumshoe.ai<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/section>\n<section>\n<h2>Actionable Insights<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>AI-driven search (AIO, AEO) is fundamentally changing how buyers search, what they expect, and how marketers must optimize\u2014think \u201ctraining the AI salesperson\u201d rather than just ranking on Google.<\/li>\n<li>LLMs (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews) are increasingly personalizing answers, using your site\u2019s content, FAQs, product detail pages, and structured data to deliver tailored recommendations.<\/li>\n<li>AI search users are high-intent and convert at dramatically higher rates\u2014often 2\u201320x higher than traditional organic or paid search\u2014because they are pre-qualified and further down the funnel.<\/li>\n<li>Content quality, structure, and freshness matter more than ever; LLMs reward authoritative, updated, and well-organized information, not just what\u2019s most popular or backlinked.<\/li>\n<li>Updating and repurposing existing content (especially with FAQs, schema, and summaries) is critical\u2014LLMs cite content that has been updated within the last 90 days.<\/li>\n<li>Competitive insights and personas are key: Tools like Gumshoe can reveal what LLMs say about you, your competitors, and which personas they surface\u2014providing messaging ideas and identifying areas to improve.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>Track, measure, and iterate: AI traffic is growing fast\u2014use analytics to see where it\u2019s coming from, how it performs, and how your optimizations are working.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/section>\n<section>\n<h2>Great Moments (with Timestamps)<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>01:31 \u2013 The Rise of AI Search and Zero-Click Experiences<\/strong><br \/>\nHow AI-driven search is changing user expectations, buyer behavior, and marketing priorities.<\/li>\n<li><strong>03:21 \u2013 Why Buyer Behavior Matters More Than Technology<\/strong><br \/>\nUsers are asking longer, more complex, and more high-intent questions, and expect personalized answers.<\/li>\n<li><strong>05:18 \u2013 The Value of AI Traffic<\/strong><br \/>\nWhy visitors from AI answers convert at much higher rates\u2014and what marketers should do about it.<\/li>\n<li><strong>06:49 \u2013 Training the AI Salesperson<\/strong><br \/>\nHow to \u201cteach\u201d LLMs about your product, and why product marketing and messaging matter more than old-school SEO tactics.<\/li>\n<li><strong>08:30 \u2013 What Content Do LLMs Prefer?<\/strong><br \/>\nBrand websites, FAQs, knowledge bases, and structured content are the top sources cited by AI.<\/li>\n<li><strong>09:52 \u2013 Why Doing Content Right Pays Off<\/strong><br \/>\nHow years of quality content and structure are finally being rewarded by AI-driven platforms.<\/li>\n<li><strong>12:26 \u2013 Content Freshness, Updates, and Repurposing<\/strong><br \/>\nThe average AI-cited content is only 86 days old\u2014updating and repurposing is critical for ongoing visibility.<\/li>\n<li><strong>14:42 \u2013 How Gumshoe AI Works<\/strong><br \/>\nUsing personas, synthetic users, and competitive insights to see what LLMs are saying about your business\u2014and what to do next.<\/li>\n<li><strong>20:38 \u2013 The Future of High-Intent Search<\/strong><br \/>\nMarketers must focus on conversion-ready, long-tail queries and position for the new funnel managed by AI.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/section>\n<section>\n<h2>Insights<\/h2>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cAI-driven search means you have to train the AI like you\u2019d train a salesperson\u2014answer objections, provide detailed info, and position your product for each persona.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cContent quality, structure, and freshness are the new currency\u2014LLMs reward the right answers, not just the most popular ones.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cFocus on high-intent, conversion-ready queries\u2014AI search gets users further down the funnel, and marketers need to adapt their messaging and content to win.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cAnalytics prove it: AI-driven visitors stay longer and convert more. Optimize now and track what\u2019s working as AI\u2019s role in discovery grows.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cCompetitive intelligence and persona insights are critical\u2014know what LLMs say about you and your competitors to improve your messaging and positioning.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/section>\n<div id=\"fbxt-wrap\">\n<div id=\"fbxt-wrap--inner\" class=\"fbxt-extra-class\">\n<div class=\"fbxt-header\">\n<div class=\"fbxt-header--logo\">\n<p>\t\t\t\t<span class=\"fbxt-header-text\">Duct Tape Transcript<\/span>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-header--nav\">\n\t\t\t\t<a class=\"fbxt-header--nav-item fbxt-nav-email\" href=\"#\"><\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"fbxt-nav-text\">Email<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<a class=\"fbxt-header--nav-item fbxt-nav-download\" href=\"#\"><\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"fbxt-nav-text\">Download<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<a class=\"fbxt-header--nav-item fbxt-nav-new_tab\" href=\"#\"><\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"fbxt-nav-text\">New Tab<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-content\">\n<div class=\"fbxt-content--inner\">\n<p>John Jantsch (00:02.52)<\/p>\n<p>Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Todd Sawicki. He&#8217;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&#8217;re going to talk about SEO, we&#8217;re going to talk about AIO, AEO, all the<\/p>\n<p>Other rows that are out there.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (00:33.81)<\/p>\n<p>As long as we don&#8217;t call it GEO, what, you can tell the person who came up with that had no background in marketing because I&#8217;m sorry, the minute I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (00:48.622)<\/p>\n<p>Sure,<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (00:54.86)<\/p>\n<p>And so with that, with that Todd&#8217;s on the show. So welcome Todd. So let&#8217;s, mean, I kind of laid that out a little bit. You know, you&#8217;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&#8217;s start with the basics. All this stuff we&#8217;re hearing about.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (01:10.609)<\/p>\n<p>Yes.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (01:21.41)<\/p>\n<p>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?<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (01:31.374)<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;re using, they started to see, look, I&#8217;m getting this new basket of traffic from chat, tbt and others. And so AI<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (01:50.478)<\/p>\n<p>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (01:58.706)<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s one of the interesting things is there&#8217;s a lot more you can do about it, because AI search is a<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;ve been complaints as end users we&#8217;ve had about traditional search and then there&#8217;s downstream applications for marketers and how to think about how you work with those platforms as a result.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (02:45.262)<\/p>\n<p>Well, and I think you&#8217;re hitting on one of the things that I try to get people to understand. Everybody always goes, oh, we&#8217;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&#8217;m seeing people do this. We used to put it in these nice little compact searches. Well, I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (02:57.202)<\/p>\n<p>Correct.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (03:09.039)<\/p>\n<p>Exactly.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (03:15.222)<\/p>\n<p>change is really what we really need to adjust to, right? It&#8217;s not necessarily the technology, is it?<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (03:21.778)<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;re seeing dramatic thing changes especially in complex areas like b2b type searches.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a great use case when you&#8217;re researching very technical things. You&#8217;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<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s a wall of 500 pairs of shoes behind that salesperson as you walk in, and the LM is the salesperson. And so you&#8217;re trying to know what&#8217;s the right pair of shoes? Well, Google you do it doesn&#8217;t really ever answer I need a new pair of shoes, you would never like Google just would struggle with that. But with<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (04:43.488)<\/p>\n<p>Or give you the most popular shoes or whatever.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (04:45.488)<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;re building profiles of you, interestingly enough. Right? The minute you put your email in, it knows where you work. It knows what you&#8217;re affiliated with. And so as a result, your users are seeing that there really, there&#8217;s a value for that relationship between you and the LLMs. It learns more about who you are. It discovers things. It&#8217;s trying to personalize the answers. And so it therefore can give you a better answer and really help you in a way that<\/p>\n<p>Traditional search never quite got to.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (05:18.252)<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (05:43.602)<\/p>\n<p>Yup.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (05:47.5)<\/p>\n<p>they are doing the filtering themselves. And if they get to your website, it&#8217;s because you had what they wanted. Right.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (05:51.258)<\/p>\n<p>Exactly. They&#8217;re pre-qualified. Right. No, and we&#8217;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&#8217;re seeing increased conversion rates up to like 20 X better. Cause again, they&#8217;re down the funnel. Cause right. When I think about, you think of from a marketer standpoint, let&#8217;s think about the classic marketing funnel. There&#8217;s discovery, then consideration, then conversion.<\/p>\n<p>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 &amp;A process consideration as well and then hand that user off for conversion and So that&#8217;s why you see these higher conversion rates. They&#8217;re further down the funnel AI has managed that now from a marketing standpoint You&#8217;re now your challenges. I need to manage AI differently because now suddenly it&#8217;s it&#8217;s the one selling my product<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (06:49.09)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (06:49.35)<\/p>\n<p>And I think that&#8217;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&#8217;re going to have to manage that person, right? That&#8217;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&#8217;s a very technical thing. And you know, any non technical marketer, whenever that discussion and by the way,<\/p>\n<p>for those who don&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;s Sporting Goods store kind of the same way. And so it&#8217;s now it&#8217;s much more of a product marketing exercise than it ever was with traditional search. And I think that&#8217;s the other thing is<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;re going to have to think about how you talk to the LLMs and how you market to them.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (07:50.35)<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;re going to get. Right. And so now all of a sudden our content has to be answers.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (07:57.222)<\/p>\n<p>Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (08:04.722)<\/p>\n<p>Correct? absolutely. So one of the things, so Gumshoo as a platform has been, we publicly launched it about six months ago and we&#8217;ve already worked more than 3,500 marketers have signed up. We&#8217;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&#8217;re able to analyze those response. think it&#8217;s like 10 million answers that we&#8217;ve analyzed.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (08:29.112)<\/p>\n<p>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (08:30.416)<\/p>\n<p>And then you really, you start to see patterns in what they&#8217;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,<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (08:50.616)<\/p>\n<p>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (08:59.896)<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;re right, you&#8217;re gonna you have to just like you train that salesperson on Rude Q &amp;A, you&#8217;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&#8217;s not a marketing exercise, and not a weird technical link building sub domain folder esoteric discussion anymore.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (09:04.738)<\/p>\n<p>Yep. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (09:25.292)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and one of the things that we have seen, because, know, I&#8217;ve always believed that, that you do content, right. You&#8217;re going to get rewarded by the search engines. Well, we&#8217;ve been doing content, right. In my view, you know, hub pages, structured content, FAQs, table of contents, summaries, schema, you know, we&#8217;ve been doing all that stuff because it was good content marketing. well,<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (09:37.244)<\/p>\n<p>Yes.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (09:52.258)<\/p>\n<p>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?<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (10:06.354)<\/p>\n<p>So if you don&#8217;t have content online, it is hard for AI to even know you exist. And so that&#8217;s sort of step one. You&#8217;d be surprised at the lack of content out there. It&#8217;s, know, all right, well, you sell it. You sell these programs. But I think it&#8217;s because everyone probably thinks they&#8217;ve all, everyone&#8217;s done content marketing. It&#8217;s not always the case.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (10:12.526)<\/p>\n<p>Well, yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Well, no, no, I would not be surprised.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s like, what are they SEOing? Like, there&#8217;s no content there.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (10:35.83)<\/p>\n<p>There you go. Exactly. There&#8217;s no content. There&#8217;s nothing else. And so the differences here you mentioned, like you generated content that the difference here though is there&#8217;s a subtle, you know, benefit and you kind of address this, I&#8217;m gonna call it what you said, which is you&#8217;re getting rewarded. But what&#8217;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<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;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&#8217;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,<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (11:18.658)<\/p>\n<p>Well, yes.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (11:28.602)<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;re good at doing is finding authoritatively correct like we like to see canonical information. And then and so as a brand,<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (11:38.734)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, that&#8217;s where you hide the dead bodies, right?<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (11:51.15)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (11:58.416)<\/p>\n<p>all that work that maybe struggled to get surfaced in Google, because it just wasn&#8217;t as popular or using out to people buying links. Now, now they&#8217;re really to your point, really rewarding good content, good highly valued structured content. And so it&#8217;s sort of like, it&#8217;s sort of the it&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (12:07.842)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (12:13.964)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (12:26.35)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (12:26.716)<\/p>\n<p>Producing great content is a payoff and it&#8217;s happening. And I think that&#8217;s really fascinating here, which is people are like, with the rise of AI Slop, no, the models want good content and they&#8217;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&#8217;s content that will get ranked in AI search and then drive traffic today and tomorrow, agentic purchases, right? You&#8217;re ultimately trying to drive some of that conversion more and more that AI will be driving that itself. Like Perplexity&#8217;s browser will load a cart for you today.<\/p>\n<p>Right, it&#8217;s loading products it&#8217;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&#8217;s happening. Now, the other stat about what&#8217;s really fascinating here is, okay, what if I don&#8217;t have been produced 10 years of content, am I screwed? Well, one of the other facts that we&#8217;ve seen is that the average age of a cited piece of content<\/p>\n<p>is only 86 days old in AI search. And that&#8217;s falling 10 to 15 % quarter per quarter. Now there&#8217;s a caveat there, which is it doesn&#8217;t have to be originally published, it just has to be updated. Like the AI will look at content that&#8217;s older, but as long as it&#8217;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&#8217;s 86 days, next quarter is gonna be 78, 70 to the quarter after that, and see you get faster and faster.<\/p>\n<p>So you&#8217;re gonna have to be doing a lot more work around content, maintaining it, updating it. It&#8217;s not a publish once and walk away model anymore. It&#8217;s gonna be a constant refresh. And so, the good side of that is you&#8217;re just starting out. We&#8217;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&#8217;s a definitely, don&#8217;t wait, get started. Hire John and his team.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (14:12.504)<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s like repurpose your content in a specific way, you know, add FAQs, you know, to that content, right? But, but I think that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re saying is should be very helpful for those people that just kind of wrote the hundred one off blog posts. It&#8217;s like, no, now go back and make that pay. Let&#8217;s talk specifically.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (14:28.146)<\/p>\n<p>Correct. Right.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (14:39.94)<\/p>\n<p>Exactly, exactly. It&#8217;s fascinating to kind of, you know, watch that all happen and come to fruition.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (14:42.742)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let&#8217;s talk specifically about gumshoe. I know that&#8217;s what you want to talk about. But first off, I have an account. I&#8217;ve played with it and it is in seemingly incredibly complex what you&#8217;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<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (15:02.844)<\/p>\n<p>Well, thank you.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (15:10.77)<\/p>\n<p>So we have a team, right? We have a team. I&#8217;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&#8217;ll drive traffic and revenue, right? So fundamentally it&#8217;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,<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (15:28.334)<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s right. That&#8217;s right.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (15:39.986)<\/p>\n<p>to 2012 and then got into paid and built a DSP. So in the programmatic space and then was playing in ecommerce and Shopify&#8217;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&#8217;re a marketer, and suddenly the channel you&#8217;re relying on Google search falls off a cliff. for some key keywords, I heard<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s an existential change in the landscape. And then as we started thinking about this in terms of working with marketers, you&#8217;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&#8217;re a marketer, you can&#8217;t just log into chat tpt and find out what it&#8217;s saying to you because<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (16:12.813)<\/p>\n<p>Mm.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (16:37.508)<\/p>\n<p>as you I don&#8217;t know if any everyone should go watch the season premiere this fall&#8217;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&#8217;s a great and he&#8217;s got some he&#8217;s trying to start a new business. And his wife gets all pissed off because he&#8217;s constantly going to ask chat tbt and says see I&#8217;m right, you know,<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (16:54.285)<\/p>\n<p>Right.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (17:05.426)<\/p>\n<p>his wife&#8217;s name is Sharon, see I&#8217;m white Sharon, chat TBT says I&#8217;m right. And he&#8217;s like, No, it just says that to everybody. And so as a marketer, you you can&#8217;t just log in and ask chat TBT what it thinks about your business, because it&#8217;s going to kind of lie, it&#8217;s going to flatter you, it&#8217;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&#8217;s no it knows how to answer things. And so then you realize as a marketer, I don&#8217;t care what LM say to me, I say, I care what it says to my target customers.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (17:17.666)<\/p>\n<p>Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (17:31.832)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (17:34.01)<\/p>\n<p>And so the way that we built our product was around how do you help marketers understand what it&#8217;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&#8217;s how it, and by the way, the variety of answers between one type of<\/p>\n<p>persona and another is fascinating. And they&#8217;re absolutely customizing their answers. Like, John, you&#8217;ve seen this, right? Just one customer will say, like, just imagine you&#8217;re a hiker, you&#8217;re going to get a different answer for the pair of shoes than if you&#8217;re a marathon runner. And so that makes rational sense as a marketer kind of understanding this nuance and how it&#8217;s treating different types of end users using AI search is sort of a fascinating insight. And it&#8217;s cool just to look at the answers and see what they say to different things. So that&#8217;s my point about marketers and the messaging and seeing how it talks to different people.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (18:06.594)<\/p>\n<p>Mm-hmm. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (18:31.374)<\/p>\n<p>One of my first observations that kind of blew me away frankly was I just put in a company&#8217;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,<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (18:39.324)<\/p>\n<p>Correct, that&#8217;s what you start with. You start with the URL, correct.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (19:00.342)<\/p>\n<p>All the analytics and search was great, but we actually got some messaging ideas just from that part of it, and that wasn&#8217;t even the intent.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (19:10.652)<\/p>\n<p>Well, and that&#8217;s what I mean about it. you know, it&#8217;s, was talking with a head of product marketing earlier today, and I&#8217;m like, this is product marketing&#8217;s moment, because AI search is fundamentally a product marketing exercise. And it&#8217;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<\/p>\n<p>recommendations. And that&#8217;s great marketing, right at feedback. It&#8217;s it&#8217;s what&#8217;s our positioning, what&#8217;s our competitive positioning, you show this to any product market, like, oh, my god, this is like my competitive messaging framework, which you&#8217;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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>But it&#8217;s no, hear this all the time. It&#8217;s fascinating. Like it is a total rabbit hole for anyone who cares about commutative or comparative messaging.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (20:13.742)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah. So the other observation is that, you know, lot of people that are talking about losing search traffic, it&#8217;s for, let&#8217;s say I&#8217;m a remodeling contractor. It&#8217;s they&#8217;re losing traffic for trends in kitchens, right? Which was not somebody that was going to buy anything, right? They&#8217;re losing a lot of that traffic because they&#8217;d written a great trend article for 2025, right?<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (20:37.138)<\/p>\n<p>Correct.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (20:38.37)<\/p>\n<p>But that was not going to ever convert. But what&#8217;s interesting from what you&#8217;re unearthing is you&#8217;re unearthing all these really high intent searches. I mean, the search string is such that it&#8217;s like, yeah, that person&#8217;s looking to remodel their kitchen. And I think that that&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (21:07.138)<\/p>\n<p>That is absolutely, I think a change, which is you&#8217;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&#8217;re right, the lack of long detailed searches in Google meant it was hard as a market, you couldn&#8217;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&#8217;s a back and forth that never existed in Google search.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (21:16.962)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, right.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (21:35.878)<\/p>\n<p>that absolutely exists in AI. And you anyone who&#8217;s experienced this, when you go to the models, it&#8217;ll it&#8217;ll ask for follow ups, it&#8217;ll clarify things, it&#8217;ll make sure it understands what you&#8217;re talking about. So that it&#8217;s its goal is to give you the very best answer possible.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (21:41.932)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (21:48.686)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, it wouldn&#8217;t have been great. You go to Google and say, no, that answer was wrong. Fix it, right?<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (21:52.324)<\/p>\n<p>Exactly, we all wish we could like that search, you&#8217;ll get some results. You&#8217;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<\/p>\n<p>hot TVs this Christmas like I just need the dang measurement. Come on, Google.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (22:23.854)<\/p>\n<p>or a link to Amazon that&#8217;s not even a TV. Those are my favorite. So I&#8217;m sorry, we got geeking out here on like all the under the hood stuff. And I&#8217;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?<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (22:28.187)<\/p>\n<p>Right!<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (22:42.556)<\/p>\n<p>So at any market, it&#8217;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&#8217;re going to enter your company&#8217;s URL. And then from there, what we&#8217;re gonna do is again, show you what LMS think about your business and product. You&#8217;re gonna select a product that&#8217;ll generate personas and then we&#8217;ll generate the prompts that represent the activity that users are having with AI. And then&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>run a series of real-time conversations, we turn those personas effectively into synthetic users. That&#8217;s kind of a buzzy word. Synthetic is the ultimate now AI buzzword. It&#8217;s a simulated user, it&#8217;s a synthetic user. And then that user will, yeah, exactly. It&#8217;s better than that. We&#8217;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&#8217;re doing well or you&#8217;re doing poorly.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (23:14.648)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, yeah, yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (23:18.83)<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s better than bot though, isn&#8217;t it?<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (23:38.736)<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s the features and benefits that we believe appeal to them and why they want to pick our products.<\/p>\n<p>And ultimately, that&#8217;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&#8217;m thinking about you and then what to do about it, right? You&#8217;re ultimately how do you capture as much revenue or as much referral traffic as possible from the LLMs. And so that&#8217;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&#8217;re going to walk away with sort of insights about what you can do. there&#8217;s, again, you don&#8217;t need an inter credit card that&#8217;s just freely available. Everyone can create an account. And then<\/p>\n<p>The way we work is it&#8217;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&#8217;re doing, you would then sign up to pay an ongoing basis. And so it&#8217;s just based upon how often you want to sort of leverage the platform and use it. That&#8217;s the model. So feel free once you generate a report, whether it&#8217;s a free one or a paid one down the road, it&#8217;s available to you for as long as we&#8217;re around as a company.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (25:03.266)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah. And one of the things that I failed to mention, you didn&#8217;t mention either is I thought does a really good job at, at, identifying competitors, as well. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (25:12.466)<\/p>\n<p>Correct, because what we&#8217;ll do is in those answers, we&#8217;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&#8217;s obviously often a key indicator. And then we&#8217;ll help you analyze where they did better versus you. So you know, what&#8217;s your point about messaging, right? And the product messaging, like what features of a competitor are winning versus ours?<\/p>\n<p>where is their positioning better? Is it something else? Or and that&#8217;s sort of a great insight is where all the other companies getting mentioned alongside you, and then we&#8217;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&#8217;ll we&#8217;ll give you a draft post for Reddit and Cora.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (25:49.816)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (26:05.498)<\/p>\n<p>Again, but it&#8217;s based upon, you know, strengths and weaknesses that we identified and said, here&#8217;s the things you should be talking about more to help you get more visibility to AI. And so that&#8217;s sort of the goal here is how do we help you talk back to AI. So you&#8217;re feeding it the features and benefits of your products. So they&#8217;ll talk about your products next time instead of someone else&#8217;s.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (26:26.878)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (26:35.792)<\/p>\n<p>We have heard that because the persona piece is great for that, like audience targeting and things like that. No, no, we&#8217;ve absolutely heard that, that there&#8217;s some interesting crossovers about this. Once you realize it&#8217;s messaging based, there&#8217;s a ton of things you can do with this data. It&#8217;s really, I&#8217;m not kidding about being a rabbit hole. Like you start reading the chats that we generate and surface. just, it becomes, it&#8217;s really fascinating to kind of see what&#8217;s being said in a way that you only ever got through focus groups or weird surveys before. And now and again, it like.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (27:10.99)<\/p>\n<p>Well, we&#8217;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&#8217;ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.<\/p>\n<p>Todd Sawicki (27:24.914)<\/p>\n<p>Thank you very much. Appreciate the time and attention.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-content--footer\">\n\t\t\t\t<a href=\"#\"><\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"fbxt-nav-text\">Scroll back to top<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-modal fbxt-email-signup\">\n<h4>\n\t\t\t\t\tSign up to receive email updates<br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<\/h4>\n<p>\n\t\t\t\t\tEnter your name and email address below and I&#8217;ll send you periodic updates about the podcast.\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<div class=\"fbxt-email-response-text\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-name-fields\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-signup-fields\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-credits\">\n\t\t<span>powered by<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/fusebox.fm\"><\/p>\n<p>\t\t<\/a>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1195,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.agencywebdesigners.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.agencywebdesigners.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.agencywebdesigners.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.agencywebdesigners.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.agencywebdesigners.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1193"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.agencywebdesigners.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1196,"href":"http:\/\/www.agencywebdesigners.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193\/revisions\/1196"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.agencywebdesigners.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.agencywebdesigners.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.agencywebdesigners.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.agencywebdesigners.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}