Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:06:56 · James Cadwallader
[00:06:56] S1: There was the birth of ChatGPT in 2022, and everything was very generative. It was write an email to my boss. It was help me craft this poem, etcetera. It was a generative work. Around 2024, end of 'twenty three, early 'twenty four, what we saw was this inflection where radio's perplexity that pioneered connecting the LLM to the web and allowing the LLM to synthesize from the web to generate an answer. Replacing the need to go and browse the web as a human. Instead the TODR is what we saw in 2024 was people shifting away from BlueLinx search. And instead just asking an answer engine like Perplexity question, and then Perplexity will send agents, so you could say bots interchangeably there, to the web, browse the web, browse the web, and then pull together a synthesized answer with Citation, telling you where it went to get the answer from. Yep. We went all in on that idea with the understanding that information retrieval is one of the most important primitives of our species. Yep. Know, it began with sharing ideas around a campfire, then went through iterations of like newspapers, television, the internet itself. And you know, blue link search dominates the idea of information retrieval or dominates the the the category of information retrieval and seeing that disintermediated by bots, I don't need to go to the web anymore. I can just ask an answer engine light. ChatGPT, and it will send agents to the web in my behalf. It's this giant disintermediation. And what that... There's a second order effect that what that means for marketers globally is, hey, how is AI talking about my brand, products and services?
00:08:39 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:08:39] S0: And how do I help that?
00:08:40 · James Cadwallader
[00:08:40] S1: And then the next question is, what do I do about it? Yep. And then if you start to go, then we can tie this all together because there's basically three stages. There's, oh my God, this is a problem. Because the world is now using Gemini, Grok, ChatGPT, Claude to, Do everything. Do everything. That's where they, that's where people are getting information from. So how does my business show up? And do I show up? And then if you recognize that, then the next question is, okay, well, they'll log into ProFound and then we can show these brands, these CMOs, these marketers, this is how ChatGPT talks about your products. This is how Gemini describes your brand. This is the difference between Claude and Grok. And this is how it's changing over time. And this is why, this is where these models are going in order to answer these questions about your brand, they're visiting these websites. It could be Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, yourown.com, competitor's websites, comparison sites, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So we can give you the what's going on and the why. And then that leads us to step two, which is they say, okay, that's interesting. Thanks, ProFound. What do I do about it? Yep. My competitor's beating me, or I'm doing really well here, but I wanna do it better, or we're completely invisible in this topic and we don't wanna be because this is important. This is a new product launch. So the answer to all of those questions is just do more marketing, basically. And do marketing, a new kind of marketing, marketing that is designed to be consumed by an agent rather than a human. Yeah. It's like machine... Marketing for machines.
00:10:13 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:10:13] S0: You have a great example. It was the showerhead example where you were trying to buy a showerhead for your apartment. Can you just, like, give everybody that example? [00:10:22] S1: Some people get it. I'm seeing we moved into a new apartment around Corneff because of the Flatiron Building. The shower pressure sucked. Obviously, don't care that much about showerheads, so I just asked Chat. I'm like, hey, you know, I'm looking for a showerhead. The pressure's no good. What ChatGPT does in the background is it send... It's 65 different web searches. Yep. I think I was using thinking mode. I used 65 different web searches to synthesize a selection of shower heads for me. And if you compare that to the human experience, know, pre LLMs, the experience might be... I I would have been lucky to have visited two websites. [00:11:01] S0: Yeah, you're definitely not going [00:11:02] S1: to 65. No. So I think that the obvious thing that we're highlighting there is that agents are now consuming this content. And when they consume that content, look for different things. Our minds are influenced by top of the range, best in class, like these kind of platitudes. Whereas agents, when they're crawling, they're looking for all kinds of granularity. They're looking at weight to pressure this, this. They'll guide to the specifics and granularity and indexing on super. [00:11:31] S0: Would you say they're doing a far better job than we would do as
00:11:31 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:11:31] S0: Would you say they're doing a far better job than we would do as [00:11:34] S1: far best job. Great. If I if I said to chat research, showerheads and no offense, you, I believe chat would far exceed your response. [00:11:48] S0: I agree. Yeah. We're limited by our I have three kids. I give up pretty quickly. [00:11:52] S1: We're very limited by our lack of patience. The whole idea of SEO was this idea of just ranking in the top five for Lou X. You didn't rank in the top five. [00:12:04] S0: You You don't matter. [00:12:05] S1: You don't matter. Why does the top five matter? What what is that? It's because humans get bored and don't wanna go past the fit. Yep. That the bottleneck is created by human patients. [00:12:17] S0: I want to talk a little bit about a great example. And so your own data shows how real this is. You had a single ChatGPT update that pushed IKEA's visibility up by 19% while sending Travelocity and Priceline down. And I think the point of that is these huge LLMs, the ones we are all living on, they're updating hourly, daily, weekly. And a single shift in one of those platforms can dramatically change visibility for some of these big brands. Talk a little bit about and obviously for IKEA to get a 19% boost while its competitors dropped quickly, That's a pretty big problem if you're running revenue and marketing for these big companies. Elaborate a little bit of how big that problem can be. Because that's what ProFound's solving.
00:12:17 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:12:17] S0: I want to talk a little bit about a great example. And so your own data shows how real this is. You had a single ChatGPT update that pushed IKEA's visibility up by 19% while sending Travelocity and Priceline down. And I think the point of that is these huge LLMs, the ones we are all living on, they're updating hourly, daily, weekly. And a single shift in one of those platforms can dramatically change visibility for some of these big brands. Talk a little bit about and obviously for IKEA to get a 19% boost while its competitors dropped quickly, That's a pretty big problem if you're running revenue and marketing for these big companies. Elaborate a little bit of how big that problem can be. Because that's what ProFound's solving. [00:13:06] S1: Yeah, each of the models will give you completely different responses. So there's this fragmentation that didn't exist in the world of search or SEO. But more than that, it's also just the, this whole term, GEO is plagued by the fact that it rhymes with SEO. Because the rhyming is kind of where the similarities end to an extent. [00:13:34] S0: It's well said, by the way. You're like, it sounds the same. It's not at all. Yeah. Like how Chat