AI is transforming how we search and engage with content online. In this episode of PR Explored, host Michelle Garrett is joined by digital marketing expert Andy Crestodina to discuss how AI-based search is reshaping the PR and marketing landscape. From AI optimization strategies to leveraging PR for brand visibility in generative search engines, Andy shares actionable insights to help professionals navigate this rapidly evolving space.
Whether you’re a PR pro looking to stay ahead or a marketer curious about AI’s impact, this conversation dives deep into strategies, challenges, and the future of PR in an AI-driven world. Don’t miss this insightful episode packed with practical tips for thriving in the age of AI.
Summary of AI-Based Search for PR
Welcome and Introductions
Michelle Garrett: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another edition of PR Explored, a podcast where we dive into PR trends and topics. I’m Michelle Garrett, your host and a PR consultant, and today I’m excited to introduce a special guest, Andy Crestodina. Hi, Andy!
Andy Crestodina: Hi, Michelle. Thanks for inviting me. I’m glad to be here and excited about today’s topic.
Michelle Garrett: It’s always great to have you. We’ve known each other since meeting at Content Marketing World, and I’ve always admired your practical advice.
The Role of AI in Search and PR
Michelle Garrett: Today, we’re diving into AI-based search and its impact on PR strategies. Andy, could you start by explaining why AI-based search is becoming essential?
Andy Crestodina: Absolutely. AI search, through tools like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, is changing how people find answers. These platforms provide ad-free, noise-free solutions, making them a growing alternative to traditional search engines.
This shift raises a key question for marketers and PR pros: how do we ensure visibility in AI-generated responses? It’s a new channel, and while it doesn’t yet have a defined name—AI optimization, maybe—it’s clear we need strategies to stay visible.
Visibility in AI Responses
Michelle Garrett: Some argue that AI-driven search is still a small segment, but it’s growing. What’s your take?
Andy Crestodina: It’s definitely expanding. Even if it starts small, the trajectory is clear. Just as social media and digital disrupted traditional strategies, AI is another evolution. Marketers must ensure their content is crawled by AI, not blocked, to maintain visibility.
Blocking AI crawlers through a robots.txt file is a mistake for marketers—it’s like hiding your brand from a key discovery channel.
Leveraging PR in the Age of AI
Michelle Garrett: How does traditional PR evolve in this context?
Andy Crestodina: PR pros are perfectly positioned to adapt. The goal is a large, visible digital footprint, but with AI, it’s more about providing rich, descriptive content that the AI can understand and recommend. It’s less about traditional links and more about ensuring your brand and expertise are well-represented in text.
Avoiding Pitfalls in AI-Based PR Strategies
Michelle Garrett: What are the common mistakes you see in AI-based PR strategies?
Andy Crestodina: One mistake is focusing solely on your website. AI reads the entire web, so your content needs to appear in various trusted sources. Another is writing specifically for AI without considering humans—it feels spammy and damages your brand.
Marketers should spend time pretending to be their audience, using AI tools to see what sources are recommended, and targeting those sources for collaboration.
The Role of Content in Training AI
Michelle Garrett: Will we see a resurgence in content creation because of AI?
Andy Crestodina: Definitely. As companies realize the importance of training AI to recognize their brand, they’ll return to content creation. But it must be quality content—differentiated, helpful, and tailored for human audiences as well.
Building a Resilient Brand in the AI Era
Michelle Garrett: Any final thoughts on thriving in this AI-driven world?
Andy Crestodina: Success comes from balancing algorithm-driven marketing, like search and AI, with relationship-driven marketing, such as webinars, podcasts, and community-building. A trusted brand with a loyal audience can weather any disruption.
Michelle Garrett: Andy, thank you for sharing such valuable insights!
Andy Crestodina: My pleasure, Michelle. Thanks for having me.
Michelle Garrett: And thank you to our listeners. Stay tuned for more episodes of PR Explored!
Full Transcript: How AI-Based Search Impacts PR – Does Your Strategy Need an Overhaul
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another edition of PR Explored, a podcast where we dive into PR trends and topics. I’m Michelle Garrett. I’m a PR consultant and your host, and I have a special guest today that I’m excited to have here. Andy Crestodina is here. Hi, Andy. Hi, Michelle. I’m, I was. Honored by the invite, and I’m glad to be here, and I love the topic we’re going to tackle today.
it’s always a pleasure to have you. You and I met at Content Marketing World, years, a few years back, and I’ve always been a big admirer of your, practical and helpful advice. And so I know people are going to be in for a treat today. And also, I want people to know that they can post questions, and we will if we have time as we go, but first as people gather and, so forth, I would love for Andy to tell us about himself and tell us what is the latest and greatest and everything going on in your world right now.
Lots happening. We are all living through a long slow motion disruption, which has been fun. I’m trying, I’m embracing it and keeping a positive attitude. But no, I’m the co founder of a digital agency called Orbit Media. Orbit’s a web development company that builds and optimizes websites. We do lots of SEO and conversion optimization.
This is year 24. I’ve been doing this a while. there’s 55 of us. It’s a full in house team and we do something like. 30 plus, high performing, optimized B2B lead gen sites per year, but you and I know each other from the world of content and the communities, that we all find ourselves in where, just teaching and helping and being a useful citizen on the internet, Yes. like we were chatting before we started that it’s just, it’s always, ever evolving and never a dull moment. And, it’s enough to keep us challenged and interested and learning. And yeah. Yeah. Yep. It’s great to have people that you know that you can trust and that’s why I love you as a resource and I want to put your I’m going to put your link to sign up for your newsletter, which I’m sure a lot of people probably already get.
But if they haven’t checked it out, they certainly should in your blog and they should follow you on LinkedIn and all those good things. So I’ll put some links up as we go here. Today we are talking about AI based search and how it is going to impact the way companies approach their public relations plans.
You did a post in a webinar and it wasn’t only about PR aspects of this but I did want to just set the stage a little bit if you want to just tell us why a AI based search is Something we need to pay attention to, and we’ll just set the stage that way. Sure. this overlaps with traditional search because AI overviews are at the top of many Google search results pages today.
But it’s also in a different, from a different perspective, actually a threat to Google itself because people are realizing that AI chatbots are a fantastic source of answers and information. Perplexity, JGPT, Google’s Gemini, there’s other, there’s these tools, are ways to get your answer without ads, without noise, without, pop ups without, it’s, just a fantastic way to get short, simple answers or very long kind of complex answers or things where, for which there’s some ambiguity, or there might not be, you’re not confident that there’s a piece on that, answer.
an article that’s answered the question. It kind of generative AI, is just surprisingly good and people are finding that out. And, I think that it’s safe to say that every day, thousands of people realize that as an alternative to Google, you can go straight to an AI, your favorite AI, tool and ask that, ask your question there.
So then we get to, as marketers and PR pros, Michelle, we get to that question of how do I make myself visible in AI responses, and to get recommended. When people ask AI for, a possible partner, and this opens up an entirely new, channel for digital. I don’t even know what it’s called yet.
AI optimization, probably not because AIO stands for AI overviews, generative engine optimization. That sounds weird to me. I’m not sure what it’s going to be called yet, but anyway, so that’s our topic today. It’s, how to become visible in AI responses. And we know, I have seen people argue that, it’s a very small percentage of search, but it’s growing, right?
we have seen statistics that you’ve mentioned perplexity. I think I’ve seen some statistics about how that’s growing as a resource for people to use. And of course, Google’s having a bunch of. It’s own challenges. I think we can say right. It’s safe to say when, of course, we’re not here to dive into all that today.
But, of course, if you’re paying attention to search, all these things are very relevant and the A. I based platforms are going to grow. I think we all can see that’s going to happen. this is, here sitting from my point of view of Generation X, I remember when digital was new, people said, Oh, that’s just a small percentage or when social was new.
Oh, most brands aren’t yet online on social media. Like this, isn’t new at all. This is just the latest disruption and change. So an opportunity. no, even if it’s small, there isn’t any question that these things will grow. it’s been the product pipeline, if not already rolled out as a feature in many of your tools.
So no tape to say this is going to be a, one of the primary ways in which people get answers and information and recommendations, no doubt at all. And so you want to be showing up. Yes, we do. We all do. So based on that, You mentioned, and you recently did a webinar, that it was excellent that I attended, and you said one of the worst things a company or an individual can do if they want to be found online is to block AI from crawling their site, and, we talked a little bit about that with Google, and now it’s the same with this, and then there are sites like LinkedIn who are saying, you can keep it from searching your posts, your content, and with its, for its AI, engine.
So I want to talk a little bit about that too. Like people, some people are really fast to want to do that. Why is that not something you really want to do? Maybe. in the context of marketing, I don’t think it’s a good idea to block a an emerging new channel from getting information about your brand and yourself and your insights, there’s famous stories.
They’re not really marketing related, the New York times wants, open AI to pay, to crawl their content. That makes perfect sense. They should be paid. they spent vast fortunes over a century creating that kind of Reddit once. Open AI to pay to crawl Reddit and scrape Reddit and read Reddit content.
Use Reddit information for training makes perfect sense, right? And these deals are being made. There’s lawsuits, there’s tens of millions of dollars changing hands because of these things, which is. Not that much in the context of big tech, those aren’t us. That’s not me. I’m not one of those brands. My goal as a marketer is to become visible, is to have people find me, is to be recommended.
So my advice here would be just to make sure that your site can be crawled and don’t create a robots. txt file that blocks the AI bot or attempts to, we can’t say for sure what it does, but you want to be crawled. You want your content to be ingested. You want to be to a, to be in the AI training data. If you’re a marketer, you want all the information about your brand to be ingested by AI and to be in the AI knowledge sources and training data.
Because somebody goes to AI and says what’s the best provider for X? you want to be in the mix. And you are stopping, you are blocking the best source of information about your brand, your website, if you use a robot. txt file that, that prevents AI from crawling it. that’s, it’s anti marketing.
It’s, deliberate obsolescence. It’s, I don’t know, malpractice. It’s a foolish move, I think. I can’t imagine why anybody would want to do that if they’re doing marketing. So then the question becomes, and I mentioned this before we went live, too, is that, so there’s, I feel like some of us are trying to figure out how to balance and not let AI into everything we’re doing, but I don’t know that we really can strike a balance with that.
can we, or should we want to? I guess if we’re doing it for marketing purposes, We shouldn’t want to. Google bot is an important visitor to your website. the chat GPT bot is another important visitor to your website. long ago, websites stopped being purely a user experience.
One of the things the website does is it’s an experience for visitors who land and click around. You have all kinds of design elements and videos and things for visitors, but also algorithms out there are powerful channels for content discovery and brand recognition. So you want them to also crawl your website.
And with that in mind, we also need to make sure that not just other sites crawlable, but that they say in basic terms, like what we do, is there a sentence on your site that just in plain, simple English names, the category that you’re in, what you do, what problem you solve, who you solve it for.
Is your elevator pitch written out and just, it’s very familiar to an SEO to make sure that you’re using keywords, but not just keywords, just in language, just make sure it’s clear and stated, clear, obviously, in a descriptive chunk of text, what you do and who you do it for and how well you do it, how long you’ve done it.
so likely this will fall into kind of the category of SEO. SEOs will be the ones that probably to become the professionals that make sure that brands can be found in AI responses. I’m sure they’ll be excited about yet another thing. They’re not, they’re freaked out. SEOs are not excited about this.
I, in my experience, they’re, nervous because it’s a blind spot. SEOs love tools and there aren’t really tools for this. There’s very few ways to. There’s no such thing as search volume, right? It’s not a search, it’s a prompt. There’s no such thing as rankings. is it, are you mentioned or not?
there’s no, Google is deterministic. it’s a rank. It’s the list. It’s a ranked list. AI is probabilistic. It’s not deterministic at all. You change one word or add a period or just use the same prompt twice in a row, you’ll see different responses. So even though SEOs should be very comfortable with ambiguity, because no one knows for sure what Google’s formula is, this still feels very uncomfortable for SEOs, I think, because it doesn’t, they, don’t know, they can’t rely on the reports and checklists and best practices that they’ve always used.
but as the category evolves, the methods I predict, the methods will be pretty familiar to lots of SEOs. Yeah, PR people. Yeah. Yeah. let’s talk. We’re gonna, we’re gonna get into that. if so, you mentioned you want to show up everywhere, right? And you wrote a blog post about this as well.
And that’s the advice that. I think you’ve always given, and that’s as a PR person, the advice that I’ve always given too, is that anytime you get invited to contribute to an article or be in a podcast or, be featured or in any way you, if you can possibly swing it, you should probably say yes.
that’s, that is to me the advice to follow. And I think you and I, in our own businesses probably follow that advice. I know I do. So isn’t, Do they do people that are, working on in PR on PR for their businesses? Should they change that approach? isn’t that the approach that we need to be embracing for this as well?
No, the PR pro is perfectly suited for this because the idea is to have a big digital footprint. where AI might be a little bit different than classic PR is that, a strategic PR professional starts with the audience and asks, where’s the audience spending time? How can we be visible there?
where, where can we meet this market? are there trade publications or, where and when can we show up, to be visible to our human audience? The SEO has a sort of a bizarre perspective on this actually, or a strange twist because they care about things like links, which aren’t necessarily human focused.
Yeah. And so you get into like link spam and everyone knows what that’s all about. The AI, the AI aware PR pro, unlike the SEO really doesn’t care about the link. You just want a, an audio or video transcript that could be ingested. Or a simple text that could be ingested to name the brand, specify the vertical or category, indicate the main services offered at some point, somewhere in this piece, because it doesn’t matter.
Probably. It doesn’t matter if that’s a, a famous website because AI is going to crawl everything. It literally took the common crawl. Some aspects, some aspects of the knowledge sources are more heavily weighted than others. For example, Wikipedia is more heavily weighted than other sources.
but generally, you’re not going to care if Google disappeared and it was just AI and you and I are a PR company trying to create visibility for. For a brand, we wouldn’t care about links. we wouldn’t care about, wouldn’t necessarily care about where the humans are, which is also weird and feel spammy.
But we do care very much about the instance of our brand name surrounded by text that indicates the category that we’re in and having that in many places so that it can be ingested by the AI. And we’re training, chat should be team perplexity to believe that we’re, legit and a real player for that.
So it’s, the PR pros are perfectly positioned. To help brands become discoverable through AI responses. So I like that you said that we’re training, it because I think that’s what we sometimes miss when we’re thinking about it, Oh, we don’t want to let it, and we want to, what’s it doing?
but we’re actually, we have a role to play in what it learns about us. So that’s where we, I think we need to be taking the bull by the horns a little bit. Yeah, it’s not happening by accident. We have to inject that, that information onto the internet. Yeah. It read the internet. So you, and so brands that have been doing this for a while are often in good, many of them are in good shape, but there’s others that are, suddenly realizing that, PR, they’ve, they just been blogging the whole time.
They never really wrote for anybody else. If that’s you need Michelle’s help because she’s going to make you present everywhere. This is you wanted the biggest digital footprint will win here for sure. this is a time to shine for the PR community. and some companies don’t even have a website at all, so there’s that too, or their website is very outdated perhaps.
I would say start there and they need help with that. and then, The PR, should come into play. But so you’re saying that they should be investing maybe more time and attention and budget into, PR and getting their name out there. yeah, if you’re, if you and I were AI scientists or, engineers and we’re building, We’re updating our model and we’re trying to make it the best we can.
And we, want to have it recommend relevant brands for a, given topic or service, we’re not going to just look at a single website. We’re training this model to, read everything and come and look for signals and then come back and recommend a brand that, that looks to be highly credible. so if you were just writing for your own website, You are unlikely to appear in our responses because Michelle and I built this thing to read the whole web and find other signals beyond just the corporate brand.
So in the early days of search or my early days of content marketing, around two thirds of my articles are written for other websites. I went on a guest blogging tour that lasted for two and a half years. And most of my content was for other domains. And that made all the difference, or it’s been a wonders.
It’s been wonderful for us ever since now is that is a similar time. we can be strategic by first pretending to be the audience and going and searching, using AI to, to ask for recommendations in our category. And then seeing what the sources are, click through, look at all the sources. Those are likely the places.
We want to collaborate with your PR help to get to appear in those places, but it’s still also unstable and new that we don’t know for sure if those will be the sources next time. But that, but no, you want to appear in many places. You should probably be investing as much or more in PR as you are in your own blog.
Yeah. that’s interesting because I always feel like, too, you can, I always try to work with clients to help them repurpose things that they might be publishing on their blog or on their site, because there’s other ways that you could possibly, probably use a customer story or a how to article or something like that.
So often trade journals are looking for that kind of content. So that’s one thing that we focus on. And I really hope that more companies get, start doing that, take advantage of that approach. So maybe they will. We’ll see. Yeah. And then in PR you, you often, the classic press release has like an about blurb at the bottom.
Do they still do that, Michelle? We, that’s common, right? Yes. Yes. I think it should be consistent every time in every press release. You’ve got another reason to make it consistent and to include it every time, because unlike the era of SEO and links. Which is still a thing, obviously, now what we’re doing is making sure the brand appears, the text around the brand or the words right after the brand name indicate the category, having 50 guest posts on, 50 different websites.
Isn’t that helpful if it’s, if there isn’t at some point in there, like the author bio or somewhere. An indication of what the brand is and what the brand does. Yes. whenever we do contributed articles, we try to make sure, of course, they always want to link in there, but we, can put the link in the author bio, the about.
the author, little blurb at the end or whatever. So there is an advantage, in that way as well. So even if you can’t talk about your brand in the post itself, you can always add that and, make sure I do like to keep them consistent as much as possible. speaking of press releases. So I talked to Christopher Penn, our friend on PR Explored, last, maybe in October, before Content Marketing World, and we were talking about, how he, and you mentioned this example of how he actually sometimes writes press releases for AI specifically, if they’re not written for AI.
A human reader, a human audience to ingest. They’re actually written for AI. And so that kind of, I have mixed feelings about that, but let’s talk about that a little bit. I have strong misgivings about any form of marketing that does not take into account a human. It just feels weird to me. It feels spammy.
It’s I’m not, what am I doing here? the concept is solid. What are we doing? We’re injecting data into AI’s knowledge sources. That includes lots of language that we want to be associated with our brand. how to do that? you can make a webpage, you could write a bunch of articles, but the press release is actually clever because when you, once submitted and picked up, it appears in so many places at once that you have extreme confidence that it’s being crawled.
And ingested. Okay. does that mean that, this is the meta description and SEO and, or the meta keywords tag and SEO and the year, 2002, this is like weird. but, so let’s say that makes sense. Let’s say it’s effective. And, by making it, by building press releases deliberately to train an AI, Is somehow a good idea.
Okay, fine. But let’s still not just slam it a bunch of keywords. I don’t, you hate yourself. You want to take a shower afterwards. what am I doing with my life? This is my job. I don’t even let AI write that press release for AI. I don’t want to be involved. So if I were doing that, I would actually, and I’ve honestly, Michelle, I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never done a press release.
I should probably get your help, have to try it yet someday, but I would write it for a human anyway. Why not just write it for a human? And you can still do, keywords in there, but, it’s a negative brand perception. If a human reads this press release about me and it’s just 200 keywords, like what is that?
Yeah. I think, he was saying it, what it’s not for that. That’s not the purpose of that particular, press release, but I still was like, I just don’t want to like, I don’t want people to think that’s something to do all the time. Maybe if you’re doing it intentionally for, for specifically for that purpose, but I just don’t, I don’t want to encourage their practice.
Cause I already see too many people misusing press releases and I am very like judicious about how I use them. I don’t think they’re, they need to be issued every day or about every single thing you’re doing that kind of need to be used in certain situations. And then there’s the whole thing about wire services, which we don’t need to get into.
But then I think, wire services are trying to say, we have an SEO benefit. And for a long time, I don’t know if that’s really been true. So this is all again, it’s really, I don’t know. I wonder what Chris would say, do you ever have to do that twice? If you saw the press release he made, it doesn’t look like that’s something you’d do even more than once.
it’s just a, it’s a one time AI training keyword injection. Good enough. Yeah. It’s not helpful to keep putting, I can’t imagine. What I do think is spammy and is effective is that, and Michelle, you’ll hate this, I don’t do it, but I’m seeing it work. if you search for best PR firm for tech companies, some of the recommendations will be, might very well be from brands that if you click through to see the source, it’s a list post of the 10 best PR firms for tech companies Made by that company.
Okay. It’s like a list. it’s if, if I made a list, like best web development companies for SEO, and I made a list of 10 companies and I put mine at the top because AI is not a, it doesn’t have an algorithm like Google with like layers of filters. And, it’s not sophisticated enough yet to check the source to see if the source is the same company that’s being recommended, it’s so there’s some pretty spammy things happening out there, Where, companies are putting lists on their own website of 10 best blank that gets ingested, that’s being used.
And the companies are just putting themselves at the top of the list, really spammy, very sketchy. Hopefully, the AI models will catch up with that and, stop using these websites as sources for recommendations of themselves.
I feel like, unfortunately, we already had, a lot of issues with people trying to do spammy, scammy, types of activities. And this AI only made it worse. And, so that’s why I’m trying to get on board and use AI in a way that makes sense for clients. But, in some ways, I’m like, wow.
Encouraging by setting an example by, it just encourages people to engage in these practices. And that’s why I’m like, yikes, I don’t know, it can’t put the brakes on it, but sometimes I cringe. yeah, there’s nothing we can do to stop these people. are members of our target audience going to use AI to look for help?
Yep. Are spammers going to use, crappy list posts on their own websites and, keyword stuff? Press releases. Yep. There’s not anything that, you know, when a new game appears in front of you, you can only choose to play it or not play it. And if you choose to play it, you can play it in a very ethical way that maintains your own self respect or you can do, you can abandon all, all considerations except victory and at any cost.
But in the end, we should always remember that there’s more to life than search. There’s more to life than AI. There’s plenty. the things you do for your clients are directly growing their awareness with the right people through humans. connecting with other humans. I try to put all this in perspective and just remember that ultimately I’m not looking for, tons of record, I care mostly about being top of mind, word of mouth, marketing referrals, the, things that are important, even if there was no internet.
imagine that world. So
I don’t know. Let’s see. So if you are trying to adapt your PR strategy and approach for AI based search, what are the pitfalls? Are there potential pitfalls that we should try to avoid? Or what should we be thinking about there? yes, I think there are things that we should, be careful about and to start with, a lot of great marketing distractions pretending to be the target audience.
we mentioned one of the pitfalls would be only writing for your own website. That would likely be a mistake. I think. Another one would be writing for strictly for the AI, bot. I think that’s likely a mistake. So just pretend you’re your audience, like 10 minutes a week, like download perplexity on your phone or pull up a browser with chat, GPT, and just start talking to it about, as if you’re the audience and you’re not yet brand aware and you’re looking for help.
What do you see? What’s that experience? keep trying different things, right? Spend a half hour. just doing searches, looking at the sources, looking at the recommendations, clicking through what seems to be working. What does it, what does the training, what are the knowledge sources for that, for your category?
And then just build a list, paper and pen, write them down. And then ask yourself, are these places where my audience really hangs out across them off? That’s a weird thing. I don’t. Even if that does become an important source for AI, I don’t think I’m going to be there. That’s not me. Or, maybe that’s not going to be a source for AI next week.
So I’m not going to obsess over this one yet, but you might get some ideas and you’ll say, yeah, so talk, start making friends, doing some outreach, do some networking, connect with editors and start, considering those as places where your brand could appear. It’ll often be directories.
It’ll be review sites. It’ll be like award sites. if you start looking at the sources, it’s, It might not be what you expect. So expand your targets and your collaborators by, pretending to be your audience and clicking through to see what the sources are on AI. If you’re not doing that, you’re really, you’re not yet in the mindset.
Of the marketer that will, win in this new era. I think that’s really where we need to, to all begin. and it’s interesting too, because I have experimented a little bit, just Googling, to see what’s happening out there in my own space. And when you Google versus when you go into Perplexity, it’ll, it pulls sometimes from similar sources, but sometimes they’re different.
And so I think that’s been really enlightening to me just to see, what actually. What of mine is coming up? And, which, where is it coming up? And then, of course, I, there’s this whole thing about people moving away from Google, but I just don’t know how fast that’s going to happen.
I don’t know. I feel like we have to pay attention to both. Oh, for sure. I saw a prediction that, Chat GPT will surpass Google for users and sessions by the end of 2026. That requires like a giant hockey stick curve. I was like, what? I don’t know that transitions happen quite that fast.
Although, movement to and away from platforms quite often. are you, are you watching what’s happening on blue sky? Yes. Sudden. Fast. Yeah. Quick growth. do you remember the collapse of, of MySpace? there’s, Clubhouse comes and goes, like there’s all kinds of, Yahoo ended very suddenly in, all the search engines ended very suddenly at the end of, end of that era when Google, I remember, these are The extreme and sudden popularity of AI.
So don’t underestimate the potential for people to change consumer behaviors and user behaviors and move, around. I, don’t, I think basically every restaurant now has QR codes on the table. What do you have to have a smartphone? That’s safe to assume 90 plus 95 percent of your audience has smartphones.
So no, technology adoption and disruption, can be very sudden and, Google might lose, 50 percent market share, who knows? I just wonder, you talked about blue sky. I just wonder how much is shiny object syndrome and how long, if it will really, be able to, sustain and continue to grow, because I just wonder, and that’s why it’s hard as a business when you’re trying to make decisions about where to spend time and resources and all of that.
How do how do you know where to go? Because, you, It’s like you have to be everywhere, but you dilute your effort when you do that. So it’s really still about determining where your audience is spending time, not for search. So I don’t know. It’s, as I said that I was like, wait, I don’t chase trends.
AI I knew would be so big. I had to study it and research it a lot. I invested hundreds of hours in the beginning to figure out what would work and what I like and don’t like, what I think is valuable and what I think is garbage. but for me, it’s, Google LinkedIn, put our, put, put videos on YouTube.
I’m not invested in lots of channels. I’m really not. I don’t chase trends mostly. I ignore, I get great results by ignoring, shiny new things. It’s fine. I love that. I’m being very intentional, myself about how I’m spending time and, maybe wasting time. And yeah, what’s it all about, in the, end, but there are plenty of bandwagon jumpers who will try to, get you to come on over.
And I’m like, yeah. I don’t know if that’s how I wanna be spending my time. and in that way I, I get a lot of messages from friends who said, have you tried this AI or that ai or this tool, or that tool? I’m, I don’t even recommend one over another. I don’t really have a point of view.
I don’t really care, if you’re gonna use one, pick the one you like. , I dunno, it’s a, it doesn’t really matter to me. I’m not an advocate for tools. Mostly, I’m an advocate for methods, processes, best practices. Yeah. Use whatever tool you like. I don’t really care what tool you use, pick, one that’s, that works for you.
in my world, and I have, I have a CEO that, one of my clients that I talk to quarterly, and we were talking about how many, companies just waste Money on technology and tools because they just sit there. They’re all excited. They buy it and nobody takes time to Learn it implement it it just sits there And so that’s a big to me tools and technology can be a waste unless you’re very again intentional strategic about how you’re Spending that money and what you’re doing with the tool because yeah I don’t think that’s going to get you where you want to go just buying a tool.
I don’t know Yeah, there’s a, I saw a great presentation from Avinash Kaushik. The analytics guy, he was at a marketing profs one year. It’s a keynote thing. And, he said, GE is on every social platform. If a new social platform called slap chat comes along, they’re going to be on slap chat, they’re going to be slapping you on slap chat.
I get it. If you’re enterprise, you can afford to be in every channel. I don’t even, I don’t know if I have a Facebook account. I took Instagram and took off my phone. I don’t want to use Tik TOK. It’d be too distracting for me. I don’t have time for that. pick your battles. Joe says Joe Polizzi, a friend of ours, mutual friend, he says, the best, brands are narrowly focused.
they build until they’re successful in one channel and then they expand. Yeah. I think that’s something that people just lose sight of. And, you can just waste a lot of time and not only time, but if you’re paying for somebody’s Time or paying for tools, you’re wasting a lot of your budget too.
So that’s, I don’t know. I always advocate if they have companies have the budget, they should bring bringing on, a consultant or an agency or somebody that can help them, talent versus just buying more tools that sit there and collect dust. And I love that advice. People are always asking us to help them build, a web, a fast website.
But if you look at all the JavaScript on these, on most of these sites, like I, there’s browser plugins that I’ll show you. They have tons of stuff installed. They don’t even remember installing. Websites are partly slow because there’s so much garbage inside. So many, JavaScript tracking codes.
Yeah. For tools they forgot they paid for. you can save somebody a bunch of money right away by just opening up their Google Tag Manager account, scanning through all those tools and asking, Do you use this? Do you use this? Do you use this? Speeds up their site. You could save some people like a thousand dollars a month just by canceling some of those subscriptions.
It’s crazy. They bought them and then forgot. Yes. Yes. I know. people, I don’t know. Like I said, I just feel like there’s not enough focus on sometimes just on the fundamentals. I’m like, okay, let’s, where do we start here? And let’s, let’s look at what we’ve already got and what we’re doing. I’m going to post another question.
So what else is important to keep in mind PR wise as we, move into the future here? Is there anything else that we really haven’t touched on that is important to keep in mind? I think that. There are, things are changing so quickly now that, I think that we’re going to do tracking manually for a time and that it’s worthwhile until tools evolve and emerge, just make, maybe with a spreadsheet, just write down, the 10 prompts that you think your audience might use.
And then tracking does that bring, does, that search bring up an AI overview in Google or what are the sources in the responses for that prompt in chat GPT or, perplexity does do it. Does our brand appear in perplexity. So if you’re serious about, AI mentioned optimization. I honestly don’t know what it’s called yet, Michelle.
This is a weird time. you should be deliberate about it and start paying attention, maybe tracking, even manually tracking, what the sources are, if your brand is there or not, and then, the next tab in your spreadsheet will have, these are the places that I need to become present.
And now you, your PR path is more clear because you’ve pretended to be your audience. You’ve tried it in a tool. You’ve seen what’s feet, what’s driving the outcomes in that tool. And now you have some new ideas for place to be present and just exclude the ones that you think are weird because it’s too early at any way.
These aren’t rules. You don’t know that these will be the same, forever after that. That’s actually the prompt your audience will use. It’s a great time to get started on this. So, click through to those sources and start talking to your outreach, get busy with digital PR.
And what you just said brought up a question, in my mind is, are we going to see more people creating content again? Because, for, I feel like the trend was, to your point earlier, guest contributions and those articles, top 50 influencers in this space and that blah, blah, blah.
So I haven’t seen quite as much of that. And I wonder if we’re going to get a swing back to, companies creating just blog posts about. All kinds of things that are going to have to be written. So that’s work for somebody. And then they’re going to need people to contribute, and be part of those things.
Is that, do you think that’s going to happen or is it happening? I do. I think there was, everyone saw it was possible. And then everyone suddenly realized that why write articles when AI can just generate answers for my audience? I don’t need to blog anymore. Then, but then the next day they, woke up and said, I need to be You know, be visible in AI.
And then minutes later, they realized like the only way to train the AI and to become president knowledge sources is to produce content. So it’s it’s sometimes it happens within a minute for some people. It took a week for some people, but you end up in this full circle thing where it’s like, Oh, blogging is dead.
AI is the new thing, but if AI is the thing, how do I train the AI with, I do that with content, therefore blogging is critical. So you’re, it’s, a hilarious moment, actually. ideally you never should have been blogging just for, SEO. Ideally, all of your content has been at least somewhat differentiated by including points of view, strong perspectives, original research, collaboration, very visual formats.
These are the things that I can’t really do. And then, And AI and SEO aren’t the only reasons you’re doing it anyway. you have an email program, you’re active on social, you’re sending your best articles to your current prospects, you’re using content to enable sales. you have, you have direct traffic visitor, you’re building a brand, which is by the way, the ultimate Holy grail, the thing that makes you secure forever after is to be, be a trusted brand in your category.
then you’re not, it’s hard to disrupt fans, people who love what you do, that’s really the goal. People who have a, who built a community. They’re not disrupted at all. They can ignore this whole trend because they built their squad. They know who, they’re talking to.
They’re in touch with them directly. they make things that they know that audience cares about. yeah, I think, in the end you can actually conclude there’s two kinds of marketing. There is algorithm marketing. Search and social and AI, then there’s relationship marketing, which is what you and I are doing right now.
there’s podcasts and emails and webinars and live events and communities. So if your entire marketing strategy is based upon algorithms, then big tech is between you and your buyer and you will very easily be disrupted. You’ll always be disrupted. So you should have at least some channels and some focus on the relationship side.
Did you know online or offline because that’s going to create real security for your brand? Yeah. And I think if you’re just spitting out a stream of AI generated, content on your blog, no one is going to care about that. So I don’t know how you would win new fans or keep the ones that you have.
So that’s why I think quality and real expertise. I feel like this is a time to shine for people that have that under their belt and can really. take advantage of that and bring it out and share it with people. And I’ve always appreciated your unique point of view advice. That piece of advice plays in the back of my head because it’s like, how are you different?
Because there are, how many other people talking about the same thing or similar, to what you’re talking about. So how do you turn that on its head a little bit? I love that too. It’s, anything that you make or had made for you by an AI, Look at it and just ask, could this have come from anybody or is this uniquely our point of view?
Yeah. Am I saying anything in here that is, a real assertion, a strong point of view, or is this maybe not, maybe it’s a how to piece how to pieces are not usually opinion pieces. Is this how to be so detailed that it is unexpectedly and disarmingly helpful. My audience will talk about it and remember it.
Okay. I get this feedback. It’s such a, this is like the highest praise. when you publish something, we have a meeting about it. Wow. I must be doing something helpful. that’s, that’s the best. so no, I think, if, whatever you’re making could be made by an AI, you should stop making those things anymore.
that doesn’t really matter. and then we keep in mind the strong opinion pieces. Sometimes they’re, you can take a little stand on something that you’re not super invested in. I once wrote a piece that said we should. stop putting press releases on websites. I don’t feel that strongly about it, but my point is you could write the story instead of posting the press release that might get the story written.
I know you disagree with that, Michelle. And I loved this because I’m like, I just wrote something for which there’s a counterpoint and I know who to reach out to about that. You please give me the counterpoint because I want my content to be a conversation. What I did was I moved the comment from below the blog into the blog, make your content itself a conversation.
AI can’t do that. AI isn’t Michelle. Only, I’m friends with Michelle. AI is not. I can reach out to you and put your point of view in there. It makes it a better piece. So do things AI can’t do. It’s very easy. It’s fun. And, it’s not expensive or time consuming. Reach out to a friend and include their points of view.
That’s great. I love that. That’s a great, actually, that’s a great note to end on. So I want to thank you so much for being here, and I want to encourage everybody. I’m going to put the link up again to, be sure to sign up for the newsletter, which I’m sharing the link to the blog, but the newsletter sign up is right there.
I don’t know if there’s a easier way or a better way. You also, Publish it on LinkedIn. So they could sign up that way for your newsletter too. is there any other way people should keep up with you? Are those, is that the best way really? I’ve done a terrible job of promoting it. I probably need PR help, but I wrote a, I rewrote the book recently.
it’s on Amazon. It’s in its seventh edition content chemistry. All of my best advice, 17 years publishing content. Are in here and I’ve added the prompts. So all the AI prompts that support every method, like the prompts for creating your content, marketing mission statement, and the prompts for auditing key pages.
No. So this is, the illustrator for content marketing version seven. Is updated just recently for GA4 and for AI. That’s great to know. I have a copy of the book, but I know it’s not the newest book, so I’m making a note here. And I didn’t know that, so there you go. I will send it to you. Please, share an address, Michelle.
I will send you a copy today. Don’t hide your light under a bushel. Get it out there! I know. So thank you so much again. And this was, a great conversation. People should have taken away. I’ve been trying to write a couple notes for myself, but I’m gonna have to go back and listen just to make sure that I don’t miss any of your very practical and helpful advice.
So thank you so much, Andy. Thank you, Michelle. I would never miss the chance to hang out with you. Thank you. And thanks everybody for joining us. And please, we’ll be back for another episode of PR Explored soon, and I’ll be sharing details about that. So I hope you join us then. Thanks so much.
