1657: AI GEO Search Visibility Strategy with Callum Kennard

Robert Plank 0:00 Generative engine optimization (GEO) is exactly what we're about to discuss today. You might have heard of search engine optimization (SEO) but GEO is the practice of structuring and publishing content so it gets cited, quoted, or recommended by AI-driven search engines and large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI overviews, and the man, the myth, the legend, the expert himself is sure to educate us. It's Callum Kennard from or Kennard. I already already messed it up, but he's the head of sales at ClickSlice. I got it right, all right, I should have more faith in myself. He's the head of sales at ClickSlice.co.uk, and we're here to figure out how to navigate this crazy world of getting recognized by AI. So that way, when someone is maybe they're entering it in their app of choice, or they're even doing a Google search, and those gosh dang AI results appear above everything else, because search is not just about ranking on Google anymore; it's about becoming the answer that AI recommends. And Kallen has spent over a decade turning SEO, AI visibility, and digital acquisition into measurable growth. And we're here to discuss it on the Marketer of the Day podcast with Robert Plank. And its good news is that SEO is not dead, but the bad news is that there's like so many changes, so many rules, and then there's things that you might want to know when hiring a freelancer or an agency to get all this work done and make sure you get to the right goals and outcomes. So, Mr. Callum, how the heck are you?

Callum Kennard 1:37 I'm doing very, very well, thank you. Over here in Old Blighty, or not really Old Blighty, back over here across the pond in the United Kingdom. I hope you're doing very well as well, Robert. Over in over in was it was it it was California, correct?

Robert Plank 1:53 California, Turlock, California.

Callum Kennard 1:55 Fantastic, amazing. Well, there's a lot to talk about when it comes to AEO or GEO. Most people know it as GEO, and it is different from SEO. However, they're very interconnected. I think one thing I want to make very, very clear is the debate around is AEO GEO going to replace SEO? The answer is not right now, and not for a long time. The reason for that is because how the heck do you think you know AI is actually binding and getting a lot of its results and answers doing it through SEO? So there's a very much an infrastructure layer there, and they're very much dependent on each other. But that's where the similarity completely ends. I usually. I usually like to describe SEO as kind of like the training wheels of GEO, in the aspect of you can't really do anything GEO, or you can't get ranked on AI answers without a certain level of SEO, because you need to be discovered, right? So I usually find that if you're a brand new website looking to kind of get involved in GEO, the best thing that you can do is actually focus on your SEO for about three to three to four months. Once you've got a little bit of traction going, you know you've got all your pages indexed, you've got some some movement on the SEO. That's your kind of training wheels, your stabilizers, and then after that, then you're completely free to kind of go off on a full CEO strategy, which is completely different from what you typically expect from an SEO strategy.

Robert Plank 3:35 Nice, so there's lots to do, right? Three to four months of work, and then that's only the beginning. And it seems like when I speak with SEO or AEO agencies. There's a lot of focus on like being discoverable and making it easy for the machines to notice you, right? Having the good old title tags, meta tags, lots of content linked together, sitemap properly sent in there, and then when I'm doing a podcast like with you and me. I'm I'm keeping AI discoverability in mind as well, right? I'm like, okay, well, well, I'll go to Callum's website. I'll read some of the headlines. I'll make sure to define some terms. I'll mention his name. I'll do my best to make sure that I do his name the same because, like, a few minutes ago, I was on a different podcast, where he his name was Joshua, and he's like, "Well, you can call me Josh. You can call me Joshua. I'm like, "No, no, no. I'll call you Joshua every time because I want the AI to say this is one entity. And it's like we we there's there's there's not enough content or quality content than we can then make, correct? And so we're like here doing this podcast. We'll get it transcribed and show notes and links back and all these things in the spirit of making sure that the the AI plus the SEO algorithm say, hey, this guy Callum, he's a serious business person, right? He's not some fly by night website or marketer. He's like creating lots of content. It's useful. People are clicking on it, they're using on it. But I mean, tell me if someone says, I'm struggling to wrap my head around all the things I need to do with SEO and GEO. Like, what's your philosophy on it?

Callum Kennard 5:10 Yeah, so if if you're looking to hire someone, be it a freelancer or an agency to you know help with your visibility on within GEO, then the one thing that I would ask you to do is please, please, please ask them what technology and what tool that they are using, because there are so many different agencies and freelancers that are using really rubbish tools, or they're kind of actually not using them altogether, and they're actually just selling you SEO and they're just using, they're jumping on the AI hype, right? And they're saying, yeah, we it's GEO optimized as well. But what they're really doing is they're doing the bare basics, a little bit like like what you just mentioned, making sure that you know your the FAQs are in place. You're doing a bit of schema. You're basically doing on-page GEO. Okay, now that's a little bit like shooting in the dark and hoping for the best. You're like, you know, it's a bit like doing really good SEO, filling in your meta titles, and you know, and making making sure that your you know your FAQs in place. But you're not, you don't have a keyword research, you know. So even though it's optimized, you're actually no one's actually seeing it because you haven't done your keyword research. It's the same thing when it comes to GEO. There's no point of optimizing all of the things if you don't really know what prompt you are targeting that people are going to be searching, that makes sense. It will help to a certain degree. You know, it might help a little bit within you know AI answers, you know, or AI overviews, or or you know, a random prompt here and there. But if you really kind of know, if you really want to target what your audience are actually typing in, then you need a really good tool. The two best on the market at the moment, in my opinion, is number one. It's Semrush, which is a it's like a anyone who in SEO will know Semrush. They'll they'll use it all of the time, and I believe they've got about over 200 million data points when it comes to understanding how people actually use prompts, which will help people target those prompts. I use a tool called Profound. It's way it's far superior to anything else on the market. It's over 2 billion data points and has access to KPIs and metrics that and data data that you know most agencies and other tools just do not have access to whatsoever. So I suppose the way that I see and the team over at ClickSlides to UAEO and GE is completely different to how the rest of the market would view it because we have access to this this data, while most people don't.

Robert Plank 7:54 Oh, nice! So it's important to have these tools and have access to data and and not just guess, right? You want the not just the on-page GEO, but also like you know, figure out what what the keyword research is. Figure out what people are typing, and if you're not appearing there, then had then get you know appearing in those results. And I find myself just,

Callum Kennard 8:14 Topic research, I'd, I'd say that. So yeah, like I I very much lean away from saying when it comes to GEO, it's keyword research. It's not the case at all. I think the average, you know, keyword when it comes to SEO, it's you know between you know two and maybe six words, right? But when it comes to to GEO, you know, we're looking at whole sentences here. You know, we could be between six to about 17 words. Sometimes it's whole paragraphs, whole essays. Very, very, very complex prompts. So, and the strategies that we use to target those is completely different to what we would do for SEO as well. So, so like I mentioned before, you know that first steps into kind of getting into GEO, having good SEO. Once that's over, it completely separates and deviates, and there isn't really that much overlap anymore.

Robert Plank 9:11 Okay, well, fair enough. And like, does it is it just me or like this feels like a really impossible undertaking, right? Because you figure like to to change the output of the AI answers, it's like it's one thing to where old school SEO where you're like, hey, I'm ranked in seventh place. I want to get up to third place, but to be like to change what an AI answer gives you seems like a lot of work. And then even if you do get to that goal, well, then I've changed what Gemini says, but not quite yet perplexity. And even if I do change what they they say as an answer, as you said, like instead of it being like a three words or six words for an SEO search, you're like targeting whole sentences, whole paragraphs. And so, am I alone in being kind of like daunted, overwhelmed by this?

Callum Kennard 9:57 It's just, just it's no more overwhelmed than SEO, and you know, once you kind of you're in it for a certain amount of time, it does become a lot more simple, at least to my mind, anyway. Think of it this way: you know, there are so many different, you know, so many different search engines. You know, you've got, you've got, you know, the two main ones are Bing and Google. You've also got various other ones as well, and but really, what everyone optimizes for is Google because it's got, I believe, a 93% share market share, right? So it's very, very similar in the world of geo as well. So there's about 2 billion users of you know of LLMs now, and over half of that is actually ChatGPT. And if you look at you know different demographics, so for example Gen Z, about 30% of them now are using ChatGPT over let's say Google now, right? So that's obviously the market leader. So that's the one to to really kind of put your focus and effort in. You know, that's that's the LLM that people are using for for search the most. So it doesn't really make too much sense to kind of do a scattergun approach across all of them and hope for the most. Most you've got to strategically focus on where you're going to get the most results, and that's kind of what we do. We typically, you know, we do optimize to every single LLM, but the priority is quite usually ChatGPT, especially when it comes to kind of getting those conversions, be it in e-commerce or the service industry.

Robert Plank 11:32 Great, that simplifies things. So when the saying the same mindset of SEO is kind of optimized for Google, and the others will fall in line more or less with AI optimized for ChatGPT, and when when we're looking to change these results, I mean, I'm sure that like every case is different, but like, what do you like to do? There, you know, there's like podcast guesting, press releases, backlinks. So when we say, okay, well, we figured out where we want this client to rank for and where we don't rank and what the change we want to make, like what? How do you approach that? What's the plan?

Callum Kennard 12:06 We've got to do an AEO audit or GEO audit that will essentially tell us what needs to be done. So every single industry is a little bit different. So, for example, you know, one of them, the clients that we're working with at the moment, it's a large, large, very large designer in New York that many many people would have heard of, and they are very much public relations focused. So it's very much about you know PR press releases. It's about kind of basically getting those external citations in magazines, and that's what really drives the needle for them, and also posting in Reddit as well. However, for another another brand search such as let's say a supplier of teeth whitening products in the UK, for example, it'll be very different, and it'd be very much focused on their own kind of like owned content on their own websites, and that's what would really drive the needle for them as well. So it really does depend on the industry, and the reason for that is because LLMs, a little bit like Google, will kind of like have their own kind of opinion of the kind of they'll put you within a certain group or a topic, and and that can look very very differently different from from industry to industry. And you're also you're also competing with lots of other competitors as well. So for example, if something's working really well for one competitor, you know that you know you know that that's probably like a good strategy to kind of replicate for your own client as well. So what we typically do is we run a full AEO audit where we'll essentially look at where the top citations, where is the LLMs getting their information from. We'll look at you know how that how it's structured. We'll look at like the key prompts and topics that are kind of used, and where the gaps are between them and the and those competitors as well. And then from that, can essentially formulate a strategy that's custom to to that specific brand. So it's quite complex, and you know I do see kind of like the same repeating patterns again and again and again, you know, within certain industries, but it's still really, really important that you don't generalize because quite often there are going to be a lot of key differences that you can't just do a big scattered approach.

Robert Plank 14:31 Yeah, that, that makes sense, and it's fascinating we hear about the multi-step strategy, right? To narrow it down and say, well, hey, this industry, this one's more we use Reddit or this one. We use more of the content on the website, and then here's the the players in the space, right? Those competitors that maybe they lucked into some really good answer placement, or they kind of deliberately played the game and hired a freelancer or an agency such as yours to beef some of this up.

Callum Kennard 15:01 Yeah, yeah, we can tell. You know, so for example, you know, when we do these audits, we can see not just a brand that we're trying to help, but we can also see the competitors as well. And if we're seeing one specific competitor every single week, they're going up in visibility, then we know that they've probably got a, you know, they're creating lots of different citations, and they've got a GEO agency helping them out. But the main KPI that we look for and we track is disability score. Those that have kind of been looking into GEO will know this. It's essentially the percentage of how many times that brand is mentioned, that's not mentioned for their target topics and crops, right? Another thing is kind of average position. It's like how many times, you know, where where are they placed within those answers? So, for example, if you are, let's say, a I don't know a an online pharmacy, for for example, and you say, what are the top five online pharmacies that provide next day delivery in this location, you know, then you might get seven different answers, and you don't want to be number seven. You want to be number one because that's the one that's going to get the clicks, right? So there are lots of different KPIs that we look for. There's also sentiments. There's also kind of citation share. There's lots of different KPIs that we track that you know is wildly different to what we kind of like would expect and look at in Swissier.

Robert Plank 16:24 Oh, nice, well, the way you describe some of these things-the citation share, the visibility score-it all just seems to me like a logical progression of the overcrowding of the internet, right? You figure, well, television used to be three channels, and now there's like you know 1000s of channels, 1000s of streaming platforms, and the the Google search results used to have you know room for everybody, and your Facebook feed used to have room for everybody. But then the more overcrowding there is, the less space there is. But then there's also the the the end user expectation for more specificity, right? The good old days, you'd you'd go and browse a directory before you could even search exactly, or you didn't mind clicking a couple search results. But now it's like, no, I'll ask the AI exactly. I want those top five bookstores near me, and I better get some results right away and exactly what I asked for. And so it's like we have to change with the times. And so this is quite a cool topic and something we need to pay attention to, right? And even more as AI develops and kind of like edges out us going to websites directly someday, perhaps. But in this conversation we're having today about AEO, GEO, doing it right, hiring an agency, etc. do you think there might be a missing question in our conversation that I should be asking you. I just don't know what to ask you.

Callum Kennard 17:45 Yeah, I think the missing question that you should probably ask is, and I think you did ask it, is are we going to get to a point where AI completely shifts as SEO? And the answer I will have to that is maybe one day, but not anytime soon. At the moment, there is a kind of battle between SEO and AEO happening, and the and it's usually better to have SEO win. I'd say. So think of it this way: most people are still using Google, all right. And you also got the AI overviews as well, so that that all kind of come in. But have you noticed that the AI overviews don't always show up? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, right? So what you'll actually find is if it's a very basic question that you're asking, you'll usually get an AI over you, okay, and it will do that when there is no specific answer to that question that a website through SEO can provide a better answer for. Okay, now the name of the game when it comes to SEO now isn't that SEO dying; it's just that you really like the you know the the the playing field has been raised. You know, the the buy has been raised now. So back in the day, it was so easy to rank on Google. You know, you could be spreading the same content as everyone else using simple SEO tactics. That doesn't work anymore. The name of the game is called something called information gain now, which means you're providing to Google information that no one else can provide. You're the most authoritative, you're the most relevant, and the most original content. And if Google knows that on your website you can be providing that, then through their AI answers, you're going to be on the first for the top rank one of Google because you're going to be the most helpful piece of content, right? So you should always aim to be that most helpful, authoritative, original source of information. You will always need AI answers with that, okay. The rest of time AI answers will always show up, that makes sense.

Robert Plank 20:04 Yeah,o there's still a little bit of humanity in the algorithm, isn't it? So there's the need to still be unique and authoritative and answer better to the AI. And you're saying that if you do those things, then you can show up potentially in the search results with no AI answers crowding you out.

Callum Kennard 20:23 Yeah, and you can you, can go and test it yourself. Go and test it yourself. Go and ask a really generic question versus a really specific complex question, and you'll actually find that a lot of the time you're not going to get an AI overview when it comes to more specific complex questions.

Robert Plank 20:40 So if, I say why is ClickSlice the best agency in GEO, we'll see what comes up. So we we do have an AI overview, but it's all good stuff about you. They do they do not treat AI optimization as a separate tactic. Instead, they blend GEO with technical SEO, semantic content strategies, and structured data; what, what an answer!

Callum Kennard 21:04 Yeah, absolutely fantastic. So, I mean, that's you know, at the end of the day, we're not trying to kind of do a AEO versus SEO kind of thing, but they're going to you know in the future and right even right now, the name of the game is to kind of have both live amongst each other harmoniously, both optimized because people are using both every single day. Yes, and we're actually going to get to a stage now where this is going to become, you know, in in my prediction, it's going every single company is going to invest just as much in GEO as they are SEO, because because their business is going to rely on it. You know, it's like yeah. For our company, you know, we're getting about a quarter of our leads and our revenue now from inbound leads from large language models, right? So we're already there, and once the rest of the industry catches up, and they're getting a quarter of their, let's say, their revenue from from AI answers. Then it's going to get to a stage where you know it's a it's a no brainer. Everyone is going to to have to pay attention to GEO. That's a really exciting space to be in. And yeah, thank you so much for having me on the on the on the podcast, I guess.

Robert Plank 22:20 Happy to have you, and it seems like something to pay attention to and do now, so that way we can be ahead of the curve. And like, who did I think maybe like Winston Churchill said, maybe someone else did, but like in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. So if these things that you're mentioning about, well, the I've got to like optimize for the the large language models plus SEO. Well, still, if if you can pull that off, then now you're doing more work than your competitors were in order to stand out. So it's worthwhile doing that way. You can have better results before they catch up to you. But as we're simplifying as much as we can and explaining, it can still seem a little overwhelming to figure all this out, and that is why it can be so helpful to have an agency help you dominate AI search, such as ClickSlice.co.uk. And how does someone know if they are ideal, optimized, qualified to work with you guys?

Callum Kennard 23:15 Absolutely, so I'd say everyone. So, if you if you have an e-commerce brand, if you're within the service industry, then we can definitely help you. If you're an established business, if you're a 789-figure, brand, you know, or if you're kind of like a new startup, then you know you speak to us. It's just the strategy will just be different depending on the stage that you're currently at, essentially. But the one thing that you know, I suppose that would really annoy me if I was a business owner or a brand owner, that would really frustrate me would be kind of you know six to eight months down the line, not actually jumping on this opportunity when it comes to to GEO and AEO because we get into a stage now where it's kind of no longer super early. You know, it's like you know three four months ago, I you know I was talking about how it's there's such an early mover advantage, and you know we work with brands that have completely outpaced you know national retailers. You know, within AI answers, just from kind of getting started soon, so soon, we're getting to that midpoint now where it's everyone kind of knows what GEO is, and if they haven't already started tinkering with it, kind of they're already they're about to. So you don't want to be one of those brands that doesn't do that, and then in six to eight months down the line, you're you then have to spend double the amount of budget playing catch up against brands that you could have been absolutely just flying past if you actually just started. So so yeah, that's my advice. My advice is don't don't wait, don't spend months. Talking to consultants, speak to an agency like ClickSlice to make sure that they have good technology and a proven team, proven case studies, and that they're actually trusted, and you can't really go wrong.

Robert Plank 25:13 Very nice, so the time to act is now. Have that conversation. If you're thinking about it, it's a sign you should take some action and book a call with them at Clicklice.co.uk to get some AI visibility to your brand. We're talking about generative engine optimization (GEO) which is starting to leave its mark on the SEO industry, and ClickSlice can help you capitalize on this brand new and untapped opportunity to increase your brand visibility in AI-driven search engines and tools. So, as far as taking that next step to start that conversation with the number one ranking agency for SEO in the UK, ClickSlice.co.uk is that the place to go?

Callum Kennard 25:54 Yeah, absolutely. And I'd actually be talking with myself as well.

Robert Plank 25:58 Nice, because you're the head of sales, of course.

Callum Kennard 26:00 I'm head of sales, but yeah. and yeah, we'd be able to yeah make full use of our tool profound and run a full AEO visibility audit, so you'll be able to see exactly how large language models are already talking about you and referencing you and your competitors, and we'll be able to let you know exactly what you need to do to essentially improve things and grow from there.

Robert Plank 26:25 And that's great because when you hear about all these new tools, you're like, "Oh, great, profound! Yet another tool I have to learn. Well, you don't have to learn it. You just hire someone like Callum and the team at ClickSlice to do it for you, and then you get the results of the cutting edge tool without having to learn stuff yourself because sometimes it's like takes time out of your day, by the time you learn it, things have changed. So just cut out that middleman and and have have them do the work for you.

Callum Kennard 26:49 Yeah, and this isn't just another tool as well. Quite literally, the market leader within the space. You know, it's the most well funded, got the most data points. It starts 12 months ahead of the rest of the industry, and we're actually partnered with them. So they've actually only got 12 partners in the world. ClickSlice is one of those 12 partners, and we're based in the UK as well. So we're kind of like leading the UK market in particular, although we work with American brands too. So, so we know our stuff.

Robert Plank 27:20 I'd hope so, very amazing and exciting possibilities ahead of us with the AI visibility, and we can find out more at ClickSlice.co.uk. But before I let you go, Mr. Callum, it's time for the scary part of the podcast where I try to stump you. I try to put you on the spot by asking you about an interesting quote or lesson that has served you. So, what comes to mind as far as a fun or interesting quote or lesson?

Callum Kennard 27:44 Oh God, I can't actually think of a specific quote, but I don't know. Maybe it's really cliche, but the thing I keep going to is Occam's Razor, where no matter how complex or clever you try to be, be it you know speaking with a marketing problem or a strategy or maybe it's an SEO audit whatever it is usually the simplest answer really is you know the correct one.

Robert Plank 28:14 I like it so dumb it down pursue that simple answer and your simple answer should be well or my the question to ask to get that simple answer is, how do I get more attention on my site and my brand? Well, you hear on a daily basis how much AI is used more and more. So contact ClickSlice.co.uk to get tapped into those AI answers and get all those millions, billions of AI users asking the questions directly to find you and your brand, ClickSlice.co.uk. You book that call, you'll be chatting with Mr. Callum directly and personally, and you have a lot of fun and get some amazing results with your AI optimization efforts. So, thank you so much, Mr. Callum, for being such a cool podcast guesting partner and having a lot of fun educating us, I'm really glad that we did this.

Callum Kennard 29:01 Cool, thank you so much, Robert. Thanks for having me on.