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Exploring the journey from clicks to conversion
1 Playsin 2 hours
Performance SEO Unpacked brings together host Ruchi Pardal and Jonathan Richards, Director of AI Search & SEO at Audible (Amazon), known for building human-centered AI discovery systems and shaping LLM-driven search strategy.
This episode breaks down how AI is compressing the customer journey and raising the bar for user intent. Jonathan shares why brands can no longer rely on traditional SEO playbooks and how building strong, consistent brand perception across platforms is becoming critical in an AI-first search landscape.
They explore the shift from clicks to conversations, why zero-click search is redefining success metrics, and how enterprises need to rethink KPIs beyond rankings and traffic. The conversation also dives into connecting SEO with broader marketing functions like PR, social, and paid to create a unified, scalable strategy.
This episode is for SEO leaders and marketers who want to move beyond outdated tactics and build durable visibility in an AI-driven discovery ecosystem.
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๐ค Guest Bio
Jonathan Richards is Director, AI Search & SEO at Audible (Amazon), where he focuses on building human-centered discovery systems powered by AI.
He brings deep experience across agency and in-house roles, working with global brands to scale SEO strategies and adapt to evolving search technologies.
๐ What We Cover
- AI-driven shifts in customer intent
- Zero-click search and evolving KPIs
- Building brand perception for AI discovery
- Breaking silos across marketing teams
- Human vs AI-generated content strategy
Guest LinkedIn
Jonathan Richards: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonbernardrich/
Host LinkedIn
Ruchi Pardal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruchipardal/
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Transcript
Introduction to Performance SEO Unpacked
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Performance SEO Unpacked, the podcast that helps enterprise businesses master SEO and get measurable results. I'm your host, Ruchi Padal, SVP of Innovation at Result First, where we've been delivering pay for performance SEO for over 15 years.
00:00:16
Speaker
If you're tired of SEO strategies that don't scale, struggle to prove our ROI to leadership, or want to stay ahead of the latest trends, you're in the right place. Each episode, we break down complex SEO challenges into simple,
00:00:28
Speaker
Actionable Steps Designed for Enterprise Success. Let's dive into today's topic and help you unlock the full potential of enterprise SEO.
Meet Jonathan Richards, SEO Expert
00:00:36
Speaker
Good morning, everyone. And I'm excited to be joined by Jonathan Richards today. Welcome to the podcast, Jonathan.
00:00:43
Speaker
Thank you, Ruchi. Very happy to be here. Audience would love to learn about your experience and your journey with SEO so far. Yeah, I started SEO. very long time ago, back when everything was super tactical and we're building links and publishing blogs, but maybe they're not the best quality. I've been and through all the evolutions of algorithm changes and so many changes the last several years. Some now that really exciting. I started out agency world um so and kind of did did my rounds with all kinds of businesses there and came in house at Audible roughly seven eight years ago. working with Audible and Amazon and been a blast ever since.
00:01:30
Speaker
Amazing. Working with known brands like Audible, they have their own challenges. Any small mistake on an enterprise brand like that or a strategy that can really kick off very well brings in a lot of excitement as well.
00:01:45
Speaker
But I would want to start from the top.
How AI Changes Buyer Intent and Customer Behavior
00:01:47
Speaker
Understand what is one major shift you are seeing in your buyer intent compared to the last two years? Obviously, looking at the evolution of SEO as a practice and the evolution of the Internet, I think we have to start there with the technology. But a big buzzword right now is AI. Everyone's talking about it. And I think what's really interesting, like looking back two years and how customer behaviors were different back then. And like, if we project out two years ahead, probably the biggest shift I'm seeing is like, if someone is on your website, or in your shop, or buying from you, that like, they are much higher intent, or they definitely want to be there um a lot more. So it's like, so intense becoming a lot higher. And the reason why this is happening is like, so if you look at
00:02:38
Speaker
the role of ai as a technology and a product inside of search and just in platforms. It's compressing certain actions. It's made a lot easier. So in the past, if I wanted to shop for something, I'd have to search and browse and scroll and click search. And spend hours. Right. And sometimes hours for one task and but definitely When you talk to people and when they are using AI, at least from like a search perspective or shopping perspective, this is the one where they're like, oh, wow, it was so easy and it was great. um
00:03:13
Speaker
And I think know it's just like a really exciting time to see this trend develop.
Impact of AI on Customer Journey and Brand Response
00:03:18
Speaker
And the compression of the customer journey is also affecting how enterprise brands need to respond to that too. and That's the other piece of this is like as the customer behavior shifts, now we need to do differently. And that's where me we have to do better as brands in this space and and think maybe a little bit more strategically than before. You've put it in a great detail here. What I ah fully agree with you is if there is a person on your website because there are so many touch points today, six, seven, eight of them before they even decide,
00:03:58
Speaker
to get onto your website or they've read something positive about your brand, for the brand should be taken as a very high important signal. Quality bar. Like how do we respond to that user when they're there? I'll give you an example that I think might be fun to illustrate this and digest this a little further because i really believe so strongly in it.
00:04:17
Speaker
but So for example, if I'm in New York City as a tourist and I want to find pizza for lunch, right? So if I'm a tourist, I don't really know the neighborhood. um And if I don't have technology to assist me, we'll just say it's I'm a tourist in the 90s and I really don't know anybody there and I'm just looking for the best pizza shop.
00:04:37
Speaker
I would have to walk down the street. I would have to look in the windows. Oh, here's a pizza shop. I'm going look in the windows. Does it look nice? oh Maybe not so much. And then I'm going to the next place and I'm doing all this work. um Whereas in the a AI search world, what this looks like is Well, maybe you have a local friend who knows a lot about pizza. and To make it closer to an AI analogy, they probably can't eat pizza themselves, just like AI can't shop for itself and have its own perspective. But they have a lot of friends. They can look at all the perspectives of other people out there and say, hey, you know what? This pizza shop's really great over here. And it's actually out of the area that you were looking entirely. But it's a much better recommendation. It sends you to Joe's or Lucali, which are probably some of the top ah shops out there.
00:05:26
Speaker
Everyone can debate
AI's Influence on Brand Perception and Messaging
00:05:27
Speaker
amongst themselves. But this is where it's like as a tourist looking for pizza, I'm getting a better recommendation, one that's a little bit more tested than just looking in the windows and browsing myself. And that's why so the brands of Lucali, the brands of Joe's, et cetera, speak more in this new future landscape.
00:05:47
Speaker
Yes, perfect example for anybody to understand this. And just to add to the, not just your friend or AI will now tell you which is the best pizza, but it'll also add, you can add on complexity of the layers with pizza as wood fired or as vegan options. You know, it's it's an endless. um Do you want it to you? ah You know. Last we spoke, you know, you brought up a very interesting idea that stuck with me, which is we need to engineer perception inside the models.
00:06:18
Speaker
What does that look like in an enterprise setup? Yeah. And I think this is where enterprise brands do have the advantage of being a brand and being a known entity in your industry and space. Typically, you're not of unknown. So it's an opportunity for everybody. But I think it begins by deciding where do you want to lean into certain things, ah certain aspects of your brand um and what what aspects of your brand you want to amplify through your marketing and your content. And then you tie that to conversations that are out there. And looking back at like how advertising and marketing kind of began, a lot of it was based on building that brand perception. um What is your brand known for? And maybe you'd run some ads and customers start buying from you.
00:07:08
Speaker
They'll have an experience with the product, which then will turn into word of mouth. And so they'll recommend it if they had a favorable experience. If it was consistent between the ad that was being presented and the product experience, they're probably more likely like they were promising that it met or exceeded that. and So that was like very important in kind of like the early, maybe the Don Draper days of men and all that. But as digital became a thing and entity, there's this amazing promise of data and all like we can measure everything. And I think this is like with technology, but we can measure a whole lot about the internet. um
00:07:50
Speaker
But I guess the downside of that is you can be overly focused on those metrics and kind of lose. I guess in the past couple decades, you maybe didn't have to be as much of a brand to be successful or you didn't have to lean on that.
00:08:06
Speaker
So you could get away with being really good at placing banner ads in the right places and doing tactics here and like you're getting, you know, think about the old versus new internet, old internet, lots of browsing and clicking. And there's, there's lots of kind of light intent. And I, oh yeah, I could steal your attention away to my website. I could convert that.
00:08:29
Speaker
Whereas now if everyone's higher intent, they're a lot harder to distract. um And so So this gets really interesting for enterprises. And so it's like when we want to look at how do we evolve into this next era where we're blending being a good brand, being perceived favorably in all of these places with all the old tactics, it really is a big challenge. And to kind of distill this down in actionable way, I think what enterprise companies should be looking at is how consistent
00:09:05
Speaker
are we with on a particular topic um that is important to us? So if our core product solves problems of x y and z we need to be super consistent about what we're saying there.
00:09:18
Speaker
and And then the other side of this is we need to be inevitably found among all of the spaces where those conversations are happening. So um yeah it's not enough to do things in spurts or kind of like push something over here or there and just try and rank for something. it's It's like, no, this now becomes we're committing to this as a brand, as a problem that we need to solve. And we are going to be inevitably found in the best solution. um You know, and this is something like, like you can think of oh who doesn't need to worry about their perception is Lionel Messi. Some might say Ronaldo, but You can't have the conversation about who is the best soccer player in the world without at least mentioning his name. Maybe a couple others.
00:10:07
Speaker
It's the same thing for enterprise companies and their product
Challenges in Marketing Channel Alignment at Audible
00:10:12
Speaker
and industry. Like, uh, if, if I want to be the Lionel Messi of my industry and my product, I need to actually be it. And if I want to be known as the best, I need to be everywhere, the marketing everywhere and be part of all of those conversations and then AI platforms, agents, no matter how this evolves, you are durable into the future.
00:10:36
Speaker
Very interesting. So having a single identity is what I want to call it right now in the eyes of AI or in the eyes of any bot for that matter, and specifically for AI bot here.
00:10:51
Speaker
It is easier for a single service, single product website. You've got one identity, you've roll with it. um I think for some of the organizations that are doing multiple services or providing multiple things, I think it's a more challenging time for them to engineer this together and create that. And a lot of people I've been talking to are now telling me AI has actually brought us back to the grounds and we are now building our foundation once again, but the foundational stuff.
00:11:26
Speaker
is so super important right now and to associate with your brand to engineer all of this for the AI world. Yeah. And i mean I really see it as the old problems are the same. Like we have all the same problems as before, maybe some new problems introduced by the technology. But um I think specifically looking at like what it means to be an in-house SEO and a marketing leader, it's there's an operational aspect of How do we actually execute against this new landscape and strategy? It's like we have to connect workflows kind of back to that concept. In the digital world, we could work in silos a little bit more and not worry about how the collective is perceived. And some brand people are probably having problem with that statement right now, but I mean, brand has always been important, but now it's more important to have that connection between all of your marketing and content.
00:12:23
Speaker
perception that you're building. And it is the challenge. And you very rightly said that historically, SEO could work in silo. But today you are connecting and something that you're already doing in Audible, and I would love to hear a lot more about it, where today you're connecting social, PR, paid, and the SEO efforts in a unified way. yeah Talk about one challenge that you faced in this alignment and how did you overcome it?
00:12:53
Speaker
so The challenge of connected marketing is not new. And I think it's been when i was at agencies, this was like one way we'd always like win businesses. is And we'd go into the class, say, hey, we will help build connections between marketing channels using SEO. And I mean, even just the classic one of, oh, let's connect paid search and organic search. It's all Google. Let's bring those together. um And everyone wants this and we know it's beneficial, but then the reality sets in. It's like, okay, how do we actually connect this? And I think
Connecting Strategy with Operations
00:13:26
Speaker
but being agency side in the past, it was on the client to make those connections happen.
00:13:32
Speaker
Being ah inside of a company, now it's on you as a leader to make those connections. And the way that I look at it is it's kind of universal approach to how do you get people to work together and collaborate and I like the idea of how do I reduce friction between team A and team b How do we make it easy to work together, but also like how do we actually make it preferable for both of our goals?
00:14:02
Speaker
And this is kind of where Everyone has their day jobs. They have their full-time jobs. So if I'm as an SEO going to another team and saying, Hey, can you do this for me? you know, I invited them to them a few beers at happy hour before they might give me one or two of those favors. So to help me with my SEO, but, uh, when you're talking about true connection and collaboration, so In that instance, it takes thinking about what is the win-win-win-win scenario between all four, five, or six of our departments where it accomplishes my goal as an SEO, my goals as a marketer, but also it's making your lives better. It is a challenge, but that is where I'm recommending people to look if anyone were to ask.
00:14:52
Speaker
Is there a specific challenge that you would love to share with the audience? I really think it comes back to how do we connect those teams? And also, i guess, like the challenge is connecting strategy to operations. That's right. It's like yeah my intent is ah seo or marketers to grow certain perception and win conversations and still maintain our SEO performance and grow these things, but also other teams have their own strategies. So it's we have to break down those silos in order to connect the strategy, but then it's operationally, how do we work out that? So that's where there's a lot of challenges now. And I think everyone's facing this collectively because the playbook of how do you actually optimize for AI platforms is not
00:15:47
Speaker
but We're coming back to the early days in a sense of what does this mean
Evolution of SEO Metrics
00:15:51
Speaker
tactically? You're doing everything you were doing before, plus you have to consider all of these new things. So it's like, how do we connect all this and actually do it?
00:16:02
Speaker
Amazing. And when you actually get down to doing it, SEO has always been driven by data. We are digging deep into GSEs, into the log files, everything. Now, and we all are seeing this, that measurement is also evolving.
00:16:18
Speaker
In the world where traditional matrix like the clicks or CTR just don't tell the full story, how are you measuring things and what are your key matrix? Yeah, we've always had a lot of quant data, but we also kind of had qual data in a way. So looking at keyword and when you actually really pay attention to what people are asking in the keyword data, we could learn a lot.
00:16:43
Speaker
And then measuring performance, we could kind of get away with what worked in the old model of the Internet, where there's a lot of clicks and browsing. So there's this very strong, predictable correlation with traffic and conversion rates. And so the KPIs could be pretty predictable. Like we could just kind of use clicks and click through impressions and conversion rates. And there we go. We have our magic. Are we ranking number one? We can kind of parse out what our click through rate will be versus if we're mid pack or lower. But now the 10 blue links are gone. And
00:17:19
Speaker
There's different customer intents that are being completely assisted by AI and there might not even be a click at the end. Zero click has been rising for years. And so i guess like some of the problems that were already a problem where we risk kind of having vanity metrics guiding decision making in SEO. um I think now we're introducing the need for new KPIs where We might even just have left definition. um
00:17:51
Speaker
So new KPIs, like what gets measured gets managed. This is something that I always look at when I'm trying to decide KPIs for a project. but What's my output goal? Okay. It's probably money of some sort, right? Customers, right? That should be everyone's. But then you track that back. It's like, well, what work actually results in customers and From an operational standpoint, I actually started adopting more um operational KPIs.
00:18:22
Speaker
What are those like input metrics that we can measure where if we do a lot of something, um can we actually tie that correlation to customer outcomes in certain ways? And then that kind of opens the door to Some of the newer measurements that support the workflows of doing optimization in the future. so a measurement of consistency is probably needed. How consistent are we across platforms in this topical area? Is there positive sentiment, negative sentiment, conflicting sentiment? Where do we have the most conflict in conflicting narratives? so And then other things too, we can look at, is there a correlation between
00:19:11
Speaker
AI bought activity, ah retrieving our website and those products and and that content on the website. And can we tie that to customer actions? So it it gets more challenging in some way. I think we have to measure a whole lot more, but I guess we never had perfect data in SEO. That's the other thing too. And and as marketers, we never have perfect data to make a decision. I don't think we ever will. um So it's like we have to be okay with less fidelity on some customer journeys while at the same time ingesting a whole lot more data to contextualize our KPIs. I think it's like we can use the old KPIs where it makes sense and we can track the one to one. it's like, okay, we got click here we got a visit check out that's still going to happen but it needs to be contextualized with also this part of the customer journey evolved or it's being serviced in this way by this channel and it's part of this broader thing and maybe we're using more awareness type metrics or even traditional methods of
00:20:22
Speaker
How did you hear about us? so It's a challenge. I think i i don't think anyone is going to have a perfect answer to what the KPIs are right now.
00:20:33
Speaker
but we're exploring together um as an industry.
Adapting KPIs for AI SEO Environments
00:20:36
Speaker
you're very right when you mentioned ditching the vanity matrix and looking for more meaningful ones, but getting the C-suite to agree to some of the new kinds of matrix. What did you go through this and what did you finally do in your conversation internally to get them to understand that this is the new matrix, this is how we're going to be measuring. I maybe not have a direct formula today that used to be earlier to show you a revenue impact, but we are still moving in the right direction. These are harder conversations.
00:21:08
Speaker
Yeah, i can I can say with confidence that Myself, but also the white other SEO professionals at other major companies across many people in my network, we're all having the conversations with leaders right now because it's a funny thing. SEO is very predictable in a way for a long time um as a channel and it was definitely not the new kid on the block. Just very established. Also very clear as Google and ChatGBT, all these other platforms perplexed, they're making all kinds of announcements that are just part of it is reaching all levels of the company and our company's collective, um all of our leaders collective. They're going to have questions now. They're like, OK, well, I'm seeing things about X, Y and Z. What do we do? so
00:21:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I can't tell you the exact specifics of my conversations, but I could tell you what I know are definitely things that people should be thinking about and talking about and discussing in light of this. And um I think with how do we evolve our KPIs, how do we evolve our measurements? How do we change things in a company? Like every company is going to be different. Every company is going to have different goals, but probably the same advice.
00:22:24
Speaker
I come back to being as clear as possible about what we know as SEO professionals. Where do we have very clear confidence in metrics? And then on the other side, we have to be just as clear about what we don't know and where do we not have fidelity in the data? And I think for anyone looking to create change in a company and like having these tough conversations, you almost appears like oh well i have all the answers figured out and here's the plan and huzzah we're off to the races but i i think anyone who's saying that now with such a new technology is dishonest and i think leaders would also recognize that they're gonna be like okay who's this seo person who knows uh ai better than the ai platforms themselves kind of back to an earlier comment it's not possible to have
00:23:16
Speaker
perfect data to make any of these business decisions. I think just being clear with leaders, here's what I know, here's what I don't know, here's the situation, here's our plan for figuring out what we don't know, that will give them confidence in whatever you're proposing to them. And if you want to change something about your program, it's like,
00:23:37
Speaker
What's going to give them most confidence is clarity probably and having a plan that makes sense that they can buy into. I think the other thing too is the leaders, they want success. They want your success. They want their success, right? They want me. How do we do this? Well, it's give me things that I can invest in where we can do work and build work. And it's like,
00:24:03
Speaker
Part of that work might be we have high confidence over a and B, that's an easy decision and that might be a simpler measurement. but The unknown um aspect is that's where we need to build our tools and capability. That's just part of it.
Debunking AI Myths in SEO
00:24:18
Speaker
Interesting. You mentioned about AI SEO and you also mentioned that everybody right now, even in the leadership, It's hard to believe that anybody would know AI SEO better than AI itself. But there's so much content online. that LinkedIn floated all conversation platforms, forums, they are all flooded. And everybody reads, even C-suite reads, the leadership reads, and we are learning from it.
00:24:45
Speaker
And it's tricky when somebody comes in with a misconception about how AI SEO or how AEO, for that matter, should be tackled.
00:24:57
Speaker
And... they are just building on that misconception. What misconception in the leadership about the AI SEO or the new era of SEO you are seeing that they should drop? I like to give my leaders a lot of credit for for doing their own research. And this is so not a new issue with SEO.
00:25:16
Speaker
How many questions have we answered over the years to clear up misconceptions around SEO? But it's a fun one because also As SEO professionals, a lot of times we are keepers of best practice and we're also in those conversation spaces and we get pretty fired up when we see things that we don't agree with or there's new information out there. But I think one conversation thread I've seen on lot of blogs, lot of LinkedIn, this is where it's very tempting, i think,
00:25:55
Speaker
a leader of any company that is in this current climate where everyone's being told to use this new technology. And I mean, how many companies are debuting AI X, Y, and z everywhere?
00:26:11
Speaker
You can't escape it. So I think the misconception is that, you know, AI potentially could solve all of your problems for ranking.
00:26:24
Speaker
inside of platforms themselves. And this might be controversial, but like AI, using AI tools and platforms to create content is not the solution that many are hoping for. Dig into what that means.
00:26:41
Speaker
In the past model of the internet, a lot of in doing SEO, you can go very broad with your keyword coverage. All the old tactics that were kind of out there, but
00:26:56
Speaker
with AI tools, you could potentially do all of those same tactics much more efficiently. It's really easy to write blog posts with AI and cover all of the keywords, right? um So that feels like a very simple solution. And it would have been a solution three years ago, four years ago, if you had that, no one else did, but it's competitive. And then you look at how the AI models work themselves and what do the AI models need? Because
00:27:29
Speaker
um The AI tools, if they generated it, they probably don't need it. They don't have high demand for it. But what do the AI platforms out there have a high demand for? It's human perspectives. So what the AI models are in platforms have conversations with people where there's lots of nuanced needs, um individualized needs.
00:27:55
Speaker
The more data that is relevant to that very hyper specific situation that the model can ingest or the better results that it's going to give. So the incentive is hyper specific relevance and improving that. And so the AI platforms are all chasing data sources. This is why but you have all kinds of smart listening devices trying to be pushed that are just lists overhearing all the word of mouth conversations that are out there at all times.
00:28:25
Speaker
that becomes data that potentially helps them be more conversational. They could generate articles themselves and train off of that, but that leads to model degradation. um So I guess like to kind of bring this back to the misconception, it's ah we can use AI tools to do better content and that's probably worthwhile.
00:28:54
Speaker
So if it makes it easier to make higher quality human perspective content, yeah probably do that. But if you're just trying to scale all your reach, that's kind of the old way of doing things and it's a losing game. So um that's it's a tricky one though, because there's a lot of like,
00:29:18
Speaker
are you pro AI, anti AI? It's like, I'm very pro AI for things that it should be doing and very anti AI for things that it shouldn't be. Right. So it's like, can we assign the right jobs for the technology? That's how I.
Importance of Human-Authored Content
00:29:35
Speaker
know Very interesting. Which ones are the anti AI categories for you where you do not like AI coming into the play?
00:29:46
Speaker
I mean, I have my personal preferences, but, I'll sometimes having an answer given to you where you cover the basics of the information, but then there is something unique from your lived experience.
00:29:58
Speaker
It's more compelling um and it's more interesting and I feel things right. So it's ah the emotion side of SEO, which is like a weird thing to be saying, but here we are. So it's just where the end output should feel real authentic and and create some emotion because really at the end of the day, it's like we could do all the tactics perfectly leading up to that moment.
00:30:27
Speaker
But that high intent click that we earn and they come to the platform. If it's just kind of robotic and then it's not very motivating, there's no emotion attached to it. You're going to lose the actual, that last step of turns into customer turns into money. So That's where, ah like from a creative standpoint, the end content should be feel very real and
Resurgence of High-Quality Human Content
00:30:53
Speaker
connective. And ai is just not there yet, but it's a great way to take care of a lot of the intermediate and steps that lead up to doing the really good stuff. So that's that's kind of my preference.
00:31:09
Speaker
Very interesting. Writing AI content is something that you picked up and ironically, that was the very first thing everybody started working on. I mean, I think logically so, right? Because that was, the change was happening and it was that old playbook. And so logically it makes sense to do what you're already doing more efficiently.
00:31:33
Speaker
But I do see the evolution now where, and my prediction is that we're going to see a rise of creative humans producing content again at higher quality standards as the next thing that people are going to be chasing and talking about on LinkedIn. It's like, look what happened to our AI strategy when we worked with real editors and did a documentary series on X, y and Z like that.
00:32:01
Speaker
That's coming. Yes, it's coming. Absolutely right. I have had so many cases where whatever prompt you write, it does give good results many a times, but then repeatability, stale content, those are also very common issues that start showing up operationally.
00:32:21
Speaker
One last question for us today. What's something that you've tried in this new search environment that didn't quite work and what did it teach you? Like some of the new tools that are out there and, um, like you saying before, it's like new technology. Uh, let's create some blog posts with this and see what this does. So that's, that's going to happen. but We have new measurement tools and probably the big one is everyone's trying to see inside of LLM models and conversations and, um,
00:32:55
Speaker
So the models aren't giving us the data. why Yes, everybody's hoping get something similar to key Google Keyword Planner coming in out of LLNs.
Strategic Use of AI Tools in SEO
00:33:05
Speaker
Yeah, and it probably won't come until they offer some kind of ad product that's really compelling. And then we get the ad data backdoor. But so right now we have all the third party tools. And so what's interesting, just running into like synthetic queries and tracking synthetic queries, And this is actually a big area of debate that I'm seeing kind of in the industry right now is like, is this even useful? And it's like, if you're trying to think about it from the standpoint of and the old way we were measuring SEO KPIs of like, oh, this ranks and then we get the click and then this happens and then profit is like the the simpler measurement
00:33:53
Speaker
assumptions that were kind of all part of that model. You can't really look at it that way. It's not a one-to-one replacement for keyword ranking tools of the past, right? So it's, I think what's interesting is like this was a risk with keyword ranking software too, but you could track all kinds of synthetic queries that will just never be part of any AI conversation ever.
00:34:19
Speaker
And part of this is also just the nature of A lot of AI conversations and searches are purely unique and that share is growing. And so it's like every instance with an AI agent is going to be unique. And then you consider the context that the model has with the user based on prior chat history. And it's even more specialized and more customized. The results are so different every time. And Having this very simple one-to-one, like, oh, we can just kind of track these queries and that proves success is not quite right. um I'd see it as a strategic tool. And this was something that I had to like shift my perspective on is because I went into it wanting to be like, oh, cool, this is new keyword tracking. But as I got into was like really poking at it and realizing, yeah, I can't hang my hat on just showing that
00:35:19
Speaker
oh I'm being retrieved in a synthetic query, right? So this comes back to the KPI conversations. Like, how does this play? This is definitely part of the measurement plan, um but it's very directional.
00:35:34
Speaker
It's better than nothing for sure, but um it's how does this tie your overall strategy? I had to look at it a little bit differently than how tools were before and how you know we would have thought about a lot of these third-party SEO tools in the past.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:35:49
Speaker
um Right. Very interesting. is's At the end of the day, it's all about data and the perspective, trying to find the right fit for the organization while maneuvering this crazy change we are living in.
00:36:03
Speaker
Thank you so much for your time, Jonathan. It's been a pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you, Ruchi, and yeah, likewise. Thank you.
00:36:16
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Performance SEO Unpacked. I hope today's episode gave you practical insights to help scale your SEO and drive results. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you found value, share it with your team or a fellow marketer. For more tips, tools, and strategies, visit resultfors.com slash unpacked and connect with me on LinkedIn for the latest episode on an enterprise SEO. Thanks for tuning in. See you next time on Performance SEO Unpacked.