Katie Keith 00:03-00:24 Search is changing fast. More and more people are getting their answers directly from AI. And that means that the way your WordPress products are getting discovered is shifting as well. So if you want your product to be the one that AI recommends, your content strategy needs to adapt. Today, we're looking at how to do exactly that. Intro 00:28-00:49 This is WP Product Talk, a place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing, business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more. It's your go-to podcast for WordPress product owners by WordPress product owners. And now, enjoy the show. Katie Keith 00:57-01:01 Hi, I'm Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2. Zack Katz 01:02-01:09 And I'm Zack Katz with GravityKit, the best Gravity Forms add-ons. Gravity Forms add-ons, add-ons for Gravity Forms. Am I doing this right? Katie Keith 01:10-01:14 Well, you are under the old way, which is SEO, but are you doing it right for AI? Zack Katz 01:16-01:21 And that's why we've invited James Baltacchino today. James, welcome. Thank you for joining us. James Baldacchino 01:22-01:24 Thank you for the invite. Always a pleasure with you guys. Zack Katz 01:25-01:44 So James, what's changed? What are we doing here? Like SEO, we all knew what we were supposed to do with SEO. Not exactly keyword stuff, but like, you know, you use variations, get your H1s, your H2s, all this stuff. What is the world like now for SEO for AI? James Baldacchino 01:47-02:47 Let me just say it's been a very interesting couple of months with a lot of sleepless nights thinking about what's happening and what's changing. But in a nutshell, you're partially right. We kind of knew what to do with SEO in general. We had really strong theories and we knew what to do, of course, to get things right. The goalposts have changed entirely, mainly because people are searching differently. This is the first time Google is under threat for the last 25 years by another search engine, because ChatGPT is basically a search engine. and Google is obviously reacting very violently to that with AI mode, with AIOs, etc. Therefore, since people's... Why did we do SEO before? We did SEO before because we wanted to be found where people search. People are searching differently. We need to adapt. Zack Katz 02:51-03:10 yeah so uh how are you how is this different uh because i you know with with google when you were doing optimization you were focusing on uh customer outcomes making sure that when they search for a certain phrase you were you were addressing their their intention uh how is that different for ai James Baldacchino 03:11-06:08 like how are you approaching it differently okay i can go on about this for quite a while so stop me when I overdo it. But, well, so one of the key things that has changed is think about yourself and the way you interact with AI or with Search now. Before you used to put in keywords, WordPress, Gravity Forms, add-ons, probably, or Gravity Forms, add-ons. When you're talking to ChatGPT, you don't do that. You ask it a question. You formulate a question. So that's already your behavior completely changing. Two, what ChatGPT and what the AIO does is it takes your query and it tries to understand what's behind it, not just answering that main query, but tries to answer a couple more questions behind it, three, four, five behind it. In fact, you can see indications of this because even at the end ChatGPT typically tells you, do you want to know this? Do you want to know that. But in the meantime, the first response would already have given you substantially more topic-wise. It was already branched out into the topics it knows people are actually searching for. So what one major change is where before we had a search and it would have a topic intent and you would discover that, you would talk about that, you would put in the value around that, and that's fine. Now we're going to a point where, well we are at the point, where the search is opening up what we call fan-outs. So when you tackle a topic, you cannot simply tackle the core of the topic, you also have to tackle the sides of the topic, which the AI is branching out to. What does that mean? That means one keyword used to mean one article. That is not the case anymore. One, by the way, the term keyword, I've hated it for the last three years and now I've been vindicated. It's technically a topic. A keyword is purely an indication of a topic. One topic can take you into a number of articles and it should because there's multiple fanouts. Google is literally calling it fan out, so this isn't the term I invented, multiple fan outs where the AI is going. So essentially what's changed is that where before Google's algorithms would kind of point you in the right direction, as you know before you would put in a keyword, find something, potentially put in another keyword, find something else, add a little more information, more searches, etc. Now do is that you get all of that immediately. For us, since we want to appear, that means we have Katie Keith 06:08-07:04 more questions to answer. So isn't that kind of what we've had for years in which we had in SEO, we had the spoke and wheels theory where you'd have a piece of what we call cornerstone content and then multiple articles pointing to that. And related to that, I suppose I've, for the last two or three years, been of the view that if you're good at SEO, if you're ranking for your keywords, sorry, then probably AI will reward you similarly. Because however much we try to play the Google algorithm, really it's aiming to replicate common sense. Google's goal has always been to provide what the user actually wants, what the searcher wants. And that's presumably the goal of AI. So can we just relax thinking that if we've got the SEO nailed, then the AI will follow through? James Baldacchino 07:05-07:50 So let me separate those into two queries. The first one is about the hub and spoke and how it's different. The second one is about ranking and how it impacts. So when it comes to the hub and spoke system, you're right. You're perfectly right. A lot of this is very familiar. What's different now is that where before building the hub and spoke would be more subject to your own opinion on what's connected and how they're connected, fine, you could do research, but it was much more hit and miss. Now AI is basically telling you where you need to go. So AI is leading the way into those spokes, to use that word. Zack Katz 07:51-08:13 So where is, you mentioned that we have to address more of the topic, cover more surface area. Where do you cut it off and say, like, I'm assuming that you know about WordPress. And how do you connect the dots for the AI so that the AI knows, okay, this is about this topic and WordPress is a different topic? James Baldacchino 08:17-09:31 Yeah. So, I think I'll turn this topic. Okay, so the good news here, sorry I got distracted there, the good news here is that when people are searching, when the search is coming up, the answer is trying to be as comprehensive as possible but really directed to what you're actually asking. Sometimes, and I'm sure you've seen this, ChatGPT eerily knows a bit more about what you're asking than the question you've put in. I'm sure you've experienced this. Now, that is where, in my opinion, you draw the line. If you're talking about, to take your example, add-ons for GravityKit, do I need to explain what WordPress is? No, because people are already down in the funnel and have understood all the basics. You do not need to stretch out that far. My favourite way of doing it is thinking of the first layer. Of course, there's a pantoor's box. You can go into more and more and more and more and more layers. Depends on the depth of your content strategy. The most important is the first layer and what's surrounding it. Katie Keith 09:34-09:46 Yeah, exactly as illustrated. Ian is commenting, Ian from Kestrel, that is, that you are fanning out my question and answering what's underneath it end on a question james Zack Katz 09:46-09:55 would you like some additional context for your for your query um yes sorry uh as in that's what James Baldacchino 09:55-10:04 distracted me because i genuinely didn't understand that uh i think you're the ai yeah potentially Katie Keith 10:05-10:10 Would you like me to elaborate and provide a worksheet for you to implement this? James Baldacchino 10:10-11:24 Ah, I get it. Okay, yes, yes, yes, that's fair. Unfortunately, I warned you before the call that the most common answer with any SEO person you speak to is it depends. And I haven't used that much yet. But the new trend is to speak about fanouts and to speak about where you should go. But Katie, you also asked me a different question and a really important one. You asked me about ranking and getting SEO right and should we worry and how the AI will react to us ranking, etc. That's a really good question. So a couple of things. We've done a lot of research on AI responses at Ellipsis. we have queried and checked literally thousands upon thousands of responses. So this is based on fact, some interesting facts. If you are ranking number one, you only have a 50% chance of being in the AIO or cited by Chatubiti. That's likely depressing, but that's the truth. Zack Katz 11:24-11:26 By AIO, you mean AI overview? James Baldacchino 11:27-13:02 The AI overview, yes. It's a 50-50 chance. We've also found that that applies to the whole of the first page. And we've also found that pages, even on page 16, 20, whatever they are, have been cited by AI and the AIO. So the short answer to your question, Katie, is no. Nailing down traditional SEO is not enough. Doesn't mean we should abandon it. No, the rankings have not disappeared. People still use the 10 blue links. They're still important, but you need to optimize for more now. So it's not just changing the way we look at things, it's adding more things we need to work on. Does ranking not matter anymore? Not at all. It still does matter, but it doesn't necessarily mean you will be cited. Answering the question is much, much, much more important. By the way, one small thing, there are a lot of misconceptions around SEO. This is, you guys, I know, know it, but worth mentioning. There are a lot of misconceptions that installing a plugin which does SEO will fix your SEO, or, you know, defining a keyword and using it 10 times in the article will help you. All of this doesn't matter. So technical SEO, yes, you need a solid basis. and many plugins do a lot of that work and they do an amazing job at that. But when it comes to putting in a keyword that 10 times in an article, et cetera, that's actually actively working against you. Zack Katz 13:04-13:44 So what is the role of different media formats when it comes to AI SEO? Like we have a transcript for WP Product Talk episodes that are available on WPProducttalk.com. I've optimized the heck out of my introduction this time with my GravityKit for Gravity Forms add-ons. This is going to be scraped by AI. The video is hosted on YouTube. This is video content. There's a transcript. It's on WP Product Talk, but it's related to GravityKit. Same with Barn 2 and Ellipsis. How does this affect our SEO and our AI SEO? James Baldacchino 13:46-13:49 Do you mean that as product talk or as? Yeah. Zack Katz 13:51-14:08 Is this video and the transcript, how is that? Traditionally, with traditional SEO, it would be like if you have a backlink, that would be one thing. Or even a mention might be helpful if it's from an authoritative domain name. But how does that all connect with AI? James Baldacchino 14:09-15:23 So the roles have changed entirely. So it's a great question. So do backlinks still count? Yes, but I'd argue that the relevance has changed entirely. What matters much more is the juice of the topic you are discussing. And if that topic you are discussing, you are discussing it with the right expertise and you are discussing it in a way which answers questions which people are searching for, there's a strong chance that yes, whether it's a video, whether it's a transcript, whatever it is, it might be cited in the right searches. the way, when a video is hosted on YouTube, you don't need to transcribe it. Google does it for you, as in this is how it brings up video responses in search. It transcribes all of the video, understands it, and then uses that as a suggestion to answer your query. it might be worth talking a little bit about how we approach this as ellipses. So the most common question we get is: "Okay, so what do I do?" James Baldacchino 15:24-15:26 Because there's a lot of... It depends. James Baldacchino 15:27-20:15 It depends. Look, the first and most important thing which needs to happen is that you figure out where you stand. Before we used to look at rankings, we used to look at a number of indicators to figure out where you stand. That has changed. Again, it does not matter, but what you do to figure out where you stand has changed substantially. Why? Because now we need to figure out what people are searching for. Now, the bad news is neither Google nor Chachapiti have released actual data of what people are actually searching for, and they have zero plans to do so. Before we had third-party tools or we had GSC which would indicate, but again this was all slightly dodgy because there was a lot of guesswork in it, especially with third-party tools. It was good indication, but it was never precise. So nothing much has changed there in that sense. So what do we do at Ellipsis when the first step is to understand what's happening? Where are you? Are you being cited? Are you coming up in the right searches? Are you showing up well versus your competitors? Are your competitors taking everything away from you? Is your content good enough? So the first question is to answer those questions. The way to do that is pretty complex. The way we do that is, and Katie's seen this, is at massive scale. So what we do for our clients is we take a large amount of core topics. What are the topics I care most about? You can consider these as keywords, but also consider them as topics. What are they? What are the ones we care most about? This is typically a mix of ones which are obvious, Like for you, Zack, it would be Gravity Forms add-ons. It's an obvious one. Ones which you know your competition does well in, a bit of competitive research. Ones which you get from your customer feedback. You compile all of that list, and then this is where the magic happens. We take all of that. For each topic, we scrape the data from all of the top 10 SERPs, all of the content, all of the PAAs, people also asks in the results, all of the AIO, and all of the ChatGPT response. And if there are any videos, we take that as well. We take all of that data and we use it. We have our own system Falcon AI, which analyzes it at extreme depth to figure out what people are searching for, which is leading to those answers around that topic. I've just spent a week stress testing it, by the way, and I'm really pleased with the results because it's really spot on. It can really correlate what people are actually searching for. So do we know that people are actually using that precise wording? No, but it doesn't matter. What we care about is we understand what they're searching for around the topic. So we take all of that data. As you can imagine, this is a lot. And typically for one topic, there will be between 8 and 20 queries, roughly there, depending on the complexity of the topic. Again, it's a dependence thing. We take all of that, we understand the queries, and based on the queries, we then, Falcon and L+, again, we then engineer it to tell us what do we need to write. How many articles do we need to write? Do we need to write articles or do we have ones which already exist which do a decent job but need a bit of help in order to be cited because they're not answering the right questions in the right places? So Falcon helps us figure out, okay, so this topic, you need to answer these 20 questions. In order to answer these 20 questions, you need to write these two articles. And by the way, you have another two which already exist, which are pretty decent, and you can answer these questions within it. That's the number one position, figure out where you are. And helpfully, I understand that this is extremely complicated to do on your own. Hopefully we can help. And yes, we can offer help in precisely giving this. Katie Keith 20:17-21:18 Yeah, that's the thing, isn't it? That it's very complex and you, well, your team at Ellipsis have spent a long time. time developing tools to analyze this automatically and get the data and people with the budgets um can use those tools by ellipsis as we do at barn too and it's been really interesting actually the last few months that you've been doing our seo maintenance for years so you come up with ideas for new content and also optimizations for existing content from an seo standpoint and about probably two months ago, it completely changed the recommendations you're making and the approach because you're coming at it from an AI first angle. And it's quite subtle. We'll get into that a bit later, what specific optimizations people might do on existing content. But do you have any tips on people that may not have the budget to hire somebody to do that? What sort of smaller steps can they take to replicate what you just described? James Baldacchino 21:21-23:06 It's a bit more difficult, but it's a great question. Small steps can be taken. It's a little bit more hit and miss, but what you could do is I would shortlist a number of queries that you really want to be found for, a number of topics that you really want to be found for, and do a little bit of research on what's being responded, what's being answered, what's being cited. Oh, by the way, I also forgot to say, when we get the data, we also get all of the data being cited from the content which is being cited. So you can imagine how big this amount of data is. I'm not saying do that, I'm not saying read all of that, but try and break it down into chunks and try and figure out, okay, so it usually does help you because the narrative just tells you, okay, so if you want this, here's that answer, if you want this, here's that answer. It's not as comprehensive, but it will give you an indication of where you need to point your ship, so to speak. So that would at least get you off on the right foot. The second point is something people constantly ignore and which frustrates me personally a lot. Katie, I know you don't, and Zack, I've worked with you, I know you don't. So great. Your customers are telling you exactly what they search for. Your customers are contacting you, your customers are sending you tickets, your customers are talking to you, they are telling you precisely what they're searching for. You know, you just need to spend a lot of time figuring out what's driving them to find you. And that's really important. Zack Katz 23:07-23:56 So to your point, James, in the past, the best way to do SEO would be, okay, you have a customer who asks a customer support question. You can use their exact language in your article to answer the question that they asked. And you know that that's then being addressed. There had been a minimum word kind of thing that even though Google said didn't actually exist, it kind of did, where it was 400 words or more or something like that. There was some suggested article length that everybody just kind of agreed was the standard. What is the deal now with content? Like, okay, so you want to answer a specific question. Can you just do a question and an answer, like a Q&A, like a one-sentence question, one-sentence answer? or does it need to be more comprehensive and fluffed out and like a whole article written on it? James Baldacchino 23:57-24:55 Alex has the best way of putting this answer, which I always love to quote, which is content needs to be as long as it needs to be and as short as it can be. And that remains the truth. You always have to remember that you are writing for humans first. And this isn't just Google taking the mickey out of us. It is true. So AIs behave in very similar ways to human beings. And that means when you're providing answers, you need to think what would be most useful to answer their questions. There are a lot of bad, there's a lot of bad advice out there. Like, for example, everyone is currently obsessing on a fake use on every page. It's a new obsession because they think that will get them cited by the AIs. To a certain extent, it does work, but context is key. Simply stuffing FAQs into your blogs will not help. Zack Katz 24:55-25:02 Right, but having a mindset of what's the next question that might be asked after reading this content and trying to address that ahead of time. James Baldacchino 25:03-27:25 And building out the content in a way which the reader finds their answers efficiently. Because that means the AI will find their answers efficiently. Let me give an example. one of my clients was tackling a topic which was how to do x okay and he had an article which basically was 500 where there on how to do x that's it however it wasn't performing as uh as yeah alex corrected my quote um he was it wasn't performing as well as he wanted it to so he asked me how to optimize it Unfortunately, his first attempt of optimizing it was exactly what Katie was saying, over-engineering the living heck out of it. So this 500-word article became a 2,500-word article going into all the aspects all around the topic. It became massive and worse still, it became a wall of text, an unreadable wall of text. He went down. We looked at it and we used this. If I'm asking how to do this, where do I find my answer in this article? Because I'm not going to read 2500 words, I just need to know how to do it. Sure, you need to provide more context, but use bullet points, get to the point quicker, tell me what I need to know around the topic much more quickly, much more accessibly. Do you really need 1,500 words to just answer a how-to? Probably not. So again, there's a lot of applying your own sense, applying your, I like to say, common sense. This is why my way of putting it is the art of SEO optimization isn't something you can just learn the rules for. You really need to figure out, you really need to sit down and understand your potential customers needs first. And it isn't just stick a keyword in or use H1s or use H2s or whatever it is. Zack Katz 27:27-28:10 So one of the things that I think is really helpful that I don't know if anybody out there hasn't played around with this yet, but if you have a ChatGPT subscription or if you have access to it, try deep research. and see what it comes up with when you just search for like, how do I do whatever your plugin or theme does or like whatever you think your customers are searching for. Do deep research, find out where it goes because it goes into a lot of different places that you might not have considered as part of your sphere of influence where, okay, maybe I need to be contacting homeowners association groups in North Carolina and trying to see if we can do cross-content promotion. James Baldacchino 28:11-28:42 Yeah. Small tip here when it comes to deep research. My favorite one is Gemini. Gemini really excels at deep research. With one word of warning, you will always get pages upon pages upon pages of data. So it's a simple search and you don't have the time to go into that level of depth. Don't go there. But from experience, Gemini really gives... fantastic results which isn't unexpected you're talking to the company which literally indexes the Zack Katz 28:42-29:27 whole internet and one of the things that another tip uh chat gpt and claude and i don't know if gemini does this but i presume they also do they maintain a memory of what you talk to them about so one of the important things to do before you do any queries for how do i do x is say like Don't use memory. Don't even use web search if you don't want to if you want it to pull directly from its knowledge base, like and it's it's trained data rather than having it do the live data search. Just ignore all that and then ask the question. And that way you get the real results. It's like doing literal mode or whatever it was called in Google. I don't think I have an alternate opinion on that. James Baldacchino 29:28-29:38 I don't fully agree with that. Two reasons. One, telling the AI to obey you is sometimes like telling a five-year-old to obey you. Zack Katz 29:39-29:39 True. James Baldacchino 29:39-29:42 Half the time it cares, half the time it doesn't. Zack Katz 29:42-29:45 I guess you could do the private mode in ChatGPT. James Baldacchino 29:45-30:56 That might be better. Exactly. So do watch out that you give an instruction. Do watch out that it actually does follow your instruction, whatever it may be, because it doesn't tell you when it doesn't follow it. If you question it, it might tell you, oh, you're right, I did it. which is extremely annoying. So don't necessarily trust that it will. So yes, private code would be much better to get this. Be the training data. GPT-5, which launched a couple of weeks ago, basically now has a decision engine that decides whether to do a web search or not for you. You can also force it from the interface, I believe. However, my thinking is in most cases, people are going to use web search. And the training data is typically around a year and a half old. So if you use just the offline data, you might be strongly misled as to where the searches have gone to now. True. It has its uses, but yeah. Katie Keith 30:57-31:17 So we've got a comment from Alex Denning, who's owner of Ellipsis. He says, I wouldn't be certain, please ignore memory is going to work, Zack. So that echoes what you've said, James. But another tip, if you want true neutral, use the API. So is that another way to get it to not use its memory and still maybe use the web access? James Baldacchino 31:19-32:05 In fact, thanks, Alex, for the reminder. That's exactly what we do in the sense of, you remember the data I said, a weak role in order to figure out where you stand. We do that based on neutral SERPs, precisely for this reason. We do that based on neutral SERPs in the US if you are targeting a US audience. Why? Because we want to see what people are actually seeing rather than what our searches might be biasing us towards. And that's really important. If you do your the worst thing somebody can say is my search my own personal search is giving this answer therefore this is what i need to do no that doesn't mean that what you are seeing is what other people are Katie Keith 32:05-32:14 seeing you need the neutral serp so we've got a comment from ian what about a logged out incognito James Baldacchino 32:14-32:58 session would that help still not enough two reasons two main reasons one your ip is your ip and that means it will be it will be localized for sure and if you're targeting customers in the us that's useless for you two fingerprinting all browsers have fingerprinting um whether you use cookies whether you use incognito or not uh there are lta signs you can look up browser fingerprinting after this podcast and be slightly creeped out but browsers have different ways of identifying who you are anyway so you will bypass a little bit of it but it won't be as alex says Zack Katz 32:59-33:22 the best way is the neutral and yeah alex suggests to use a service called open router is a good way to access API of all sorts of different AIs, not just ChatGPT or like OpenAI. - Exactly. - Yeah. And it's a cool service to sign up for and check out anyway because it exposes you to a lot of other options. James Baldacchino 33:23-33:39 - It's extremely cool. I love it when I put in a query and it gives me, and I choose the ones I want, and it just gives me five different answers and figure out what's different that you can spend days looking through it. So yeah, it's a really cool one. Zack Katz 33:39-34:26 So we've talked a lot about like searching like people used to do and addressing topics and stuff. We're a podcast for WordPress product owners. A lot of our products are going to be suggested away from us and they're going to say, well, you can do this using code. And here's some code example. Like how do I display Gravity Forms entries on my website? well, here's a custom built plugin for you, install this. Automatic has the telex block. We could just build this using telex now. How are you thinking about addressing that threat to product owners when it comes to AI search? A couple of answers here. James Baldacchino 34:27-34:33 First of all, don't think that all your clients are going to appreciate the code snippet. James Baldacchino 34:33-34:34 I can share my own anecdote. James Baldacchino 34:35-36:03 I was helping a friend of mine migrate his WordPress website from a host to another hotel nightmare last week. And, of course, issues happen with the database, even though the migration should have been easy. And I had no idea. I have no idea how to do any database work. So, of course, I asked ChatChapiti, and ChatChapiti gave me the coding way and gave me the plugin way. Guess which I chose? I wasn't going to touch the code. Not when I don't know what I'm doing. And it worked, and that was fine. So don't necessarily think that people might always go for the code option. Some developers might, yes. Some people who are more confident might. But you can't really tell who. Again, I've worked a lot with Chachapiti and Claude when it comes to coding stuff and scripts and things like that. They do regularly get things wrong. And they tell you that it's right. And I had one situation where it kept giving me version final, final, final, completely works. And none of it worked. So code snippets you always have to approach with caution. And people who don't know that will probably learn that after a little bit of working with Chachapiti or Claude. I've been trying to tell that if you're not a developer, you can't get very good vibe coding out of AI. Katie Keith 36:03-36:41 You really need to know what you're asking it. So essentially, this may not be very different to the olden days of things like Stack Overflow, which was always competing for us in the Google search results. Not everybody wanted to be copying and pasting code snippets. So it's not that different than that, especially for complex plugins like displaying Gravity Forms entries in an interactive format on the front end. To vibe code that if you're not an experienced developer, it's not going to get great results and it'll get you a lot of headaches. So hopefully people won't be any more threatened than the previous code snippets. James Baldacchino 36:42-37:36 And there are quirks as well. Like, for example, now file handling is much better. but even just a couple of weeks ago, because this moves at extreme speed, even just a couple of weeks ago, sometimes you would upload, for example, a CSV, and it wouldn't really work well. And, for example, at one point, I was really frustrated because I was uploading a CSV and just trying to get it to do some stuff to it, and it just wasn't working, and it was trying to invent stuff. And as Katie said, I spoke to our developer. We have a full-time lead developer who helps us develop our technology at Ellipsis. And he gave me the most surprising tip. He told me, no, no, tell it to first go the way to open the CSV. Then do what you want. And it worked immediately. Now, file handling is much better now already. But still, I would never have thought of that myself. Katie Keith 37:39-38:18 So before we finish, I'd like to talk a bit about how we can optimize content with AI in mind. We've got a comment about this, but I'll bring that in at the appropriate time in a minute. So I've noticed at Ellipsis, when you make recommendations on how we can analyze our content, it's very different. You're including all these new concepts that I've not seen before, such as adding FAQs to a lot more articles. You've introduced this thing called atomic sentences and lots of things like that. So could you talk a bit about what strategies people can use to optimize individual pieces of content? James Baldacchino 38:21-40:40 So it's a excellent question. So my favorite way is to always quote, and people who know me are going to groan at this, to always quote the title of one of my favorite books, which is an old book. but still applies to the even though it's old, which is called don't make me think. And that applies for this. If you're answering a question, don't make people think. Provide them with a solution. Don't sugarcoat it. Don't go into a lot of extra detail, which you don't need to, but provide value. And providing value and answering people's questions is paramount. So what does that translate to? That translates to things like readability. Why does Chachapiti love bullet points? Because it's much more readable. That's why it feeds you a lot of bullet points. And that also tells you how people behave. People like bullet points when they're answering questions because it helps you read. Readability is extremely important. The visuals also help because you can be breaking up a wall of text. These sound but I feel that especially with SEO, we are so obsessed with optimizing as a magic wand that we forget the basics and we get it wrong a lot. Now, there's still an art to it and you still need to know what you're doing. And as I said, this is why I said you start with figuring out where you are and where you stand and what questions need to be answered and then prioritize working on those. That is absolutely core to anything you do. When it comes to answering, there's no magic tool. There's no something you pop in and it will optimize it for a SEO magically. If somebody tells you that exists, they're taking the mickey out of you. When you come to answering those questions, when you've figured out what they are, and when you figured out what you need to say, it's a question of answering them in a helpful way, which gives value, which answers the question, which says what they are looking for really well. And as we said at the beginning, what they are looking for is not one topic anymore. It's a bunch of stuff. Zack Katz 40:44-40:51 And do you need to provide a markdown version of it? Does it need to be referenced in llms.text, llmsfull.text? James Baldacchino 40:51-42:00 Oh, this is my favorite pet peeve. LLMs.text is one of these magic tricks which works, which doesn't do a thing. Google themselves have made it very clear. And what people have done is they've looked at what is being crawled by LLMs when they visit their site. And not a single one so far has actually crawled LLMs.txt. Why? Because LLMs.txt was made up by someone who had all the right intentions in the world to set it as a standard like robots.txt. It was a proposal. And then the internet went wild and thought it was done. No, it's a proposal which so far no one has accepted. But since it was an easy do this and you'll do well, everyone just ran with it. And now everyone is generating it for you and your host is generating it for you. a plugin is generating for you anyone it's just a waste of time but markdown files uh strip out a Zack Katz 42:00-42:06 lot of junk in the html and provide the raw content are markdown versions of articles or James Baldacchino 42:07-42:55 a website is that helpful look ultimately that there's also a little bit of accessibility in markdown and and ultimately so that's not going to be harmful at all so markdown are going to be of technical SEO are still important. Like the sitemap is still important, getting the schema and putting in the right schemas in your content is still very important. So the basics of technical SEO are excellent, are necessary, but obsessing on getting technical SEO 100% right because that will raise your chances is wrong. If you have a choice between obsessing on the quality of the content and not caring about technical SEO or vice versa, go for the content. Zack Katz 42:57-45:11 That sounds good because I tried doing an LLMS.txt thing and it's a pain in the neck to get it optimized for something that apparently nobody even cares about. We have put in a markdown drop down like when we saw that Claude had the view as markdown and share for LLMs that way, had that option on their website and their own documentation, we decided to implement that ourselves. One of the ways that we're approaching AI SEO in GravityKit is really focusing on our documentation a lot. We have a ton of blog articles and we have a ton of existing documentation, but the documentation often refers to other documentation and it's kind of an interconnected web that from my understanding, uh, the prior, you know, uh, standards were better at, at scraping and the AI is better at understanding if you have it all in one place and better, a little, a little bit better, maybe like you want to, instead of saying like, click this link to learn the, this, you might want to put it in line, right? So we're, we're really focusing on documentation and having videos available for people. And like all of this stuff is just good Anyway, you want every single setting in your plugin to be documented and you want to explain what like what happens when you change this or how to do this from start to finish. All of these things are good practices anyway. But one of the things that anybody who's played around with AI can can and code bases can understand is AI isn't good at inferring what things can do unless you tell it what it's being used for. So like, you know, GravityView can do anything you want it to. You can build powerful web apps, but AI won't necessarily know exactly how to configure that until you explain it in documentation. And so that's really what we're focusing on for really the next year is fine, like documenting, documenting, documenting, connecting the dots so that it's easier for the AI and our users to do the same. Couple of points. James Baldacchino 45:12-45:46 Okay. A couple of points. So first of all, yes, at bare minimum, getting your documentation right is important because at bare minimum, it helps people understand things and it will reduce your support tickets. So it's always a win-win-win to do proper documentation. Putting things all in one, not necessarily always the right approach. It depends on the query and how it leads to one another. There's this whole complexity. But I have a trick question for you. all this optimization you're doing. Do you have a sense of what impact you're having? Zack Katz 45:48-47:00 Well, here's the thing. Documentation is not only for our users. It's also for our internal developers and our internal support team because if it's documented, it's out of our head and onto the page. And it's something that we can use and rely on. And I have a theory that we're going to be a documentation-first company moving forward so that if we want something to, you know, in development, there's a concept of test-driven development. You write a test and you say, when this passes, your code is ready. Like if you have a good enough test, the code writes itself. And similarly, Jeff Bezos, when he has a new product launch that he wants to do, he writes the press release first. And then that allows alignment to what the end state will be. so if we were to have documentation driven development this is how it should work and then everything kind of funnels from that that might be a good way to do things so that's kind of my working theory is that like if we document what exists and then we document how it should work and like refine to to meet that standard i'm not the reason i'm not going to push James Baldacchino 47:00-47:27 back on this hypothesis is because there is nothing to say you're wrong there's also nothing to say You're right in the sense of you're being helpful. So that in theory does make sense. However, my concern is that you said you're going to focus on this for the next year. Great. But you need a sense of whether it's actually working. Right. Is it helping you being found? Is it helping you being, is it helping you show up? Zack Katz 47:28-47:59 With AI search. It's also, we use DocSpot, which is a great service for any product owners out there, Docsbot.ai, D-O-C-S-B-O-T.ai, because AI always misspells that when it transcribes it. And they read our documentation. And that is then used for self-help portals for our customers who ask questions about the product. So if somebody comes to our website and they use our own widgets and the widgets aren't trained on the right data, then that is in our own website, an AI search James Baldacchino 47:59-48:06 problem true but that doesn't solve the problem to get people to your website no but we're getting a Zack Katz 48:06-48:42 lot of traffic like GravityKit we get a ton of traffic because we have such good blog articles we got a lot of good documentation and then it's connecting all the dots for like okay how do i actually use this to get my job done and that's where i think if we if we as product owners have documentation that includes blog articles that includes videos how do i do this with like in general and a our product is the best option be like Ian wrote like when you write a blogger when you write a blog article promoting your product should you also include other options I I would say why not James what do you say about James Baldacchino 48:43-49:28 that and if it's in your knowledge base probably not because your knowledge base is about your product and your knowledge base is where people come to figure out stuff and so it would be odd to say you can bypass my product by doing X If, on the other hand, you're being helpful and you're writing a blog post about how to solve this in five different ways for the sake of the argument, yes, why not? It is going to be helpful. As I said, do not underestimate or overestimate your readers and they will go for the solution they want to pick. They want to be treated with honesty as to what the real solutions are. And then, as I told you with my own example, as soon as I saw code, I said, I am not touching this. I am going for the plugin. Which plugin is best for this? And that's where my search led me. Katie Keith 49:30-50:03 But yeah, there's a chance they will click through to your website if the AI has provided that reference. And then obviously your product is before the code snippet. Ellipsis often recommend to me that I put code snippets into our blog posts about our product. If they do end up visiting our website, then they need to scroll past the product and hopefully see the amazing screenshots and like that solution. But of course, a lot of people will just take the code snippet directly from the AI results and not click through to our website. But they're just going to get it from elsewhere. Otherwise, aren't they? James Baldacchino 50:03-50:25 Exactly. But one small thing, Zack. I personally, if we were having a consultative session, I would tell you, don't obsess too much about documentation. It's good to have, it's good, but that doesn't mean you're optimizing well for a CEO and you need to figure out where you stand, especially versus your competitors. Figure out where you need to focus. Zack Katz 50:26-50:30 Well, Casey, who's in charge of our marketing, will be very pleased to hear that. James Baldacchino 50:31-50:36 And I'm happy to support him. I know him and yeah, tell him to ping me and we'll have a chat. Katie Keith 50:38-50:56 And you know what I can never believe is the product companies that hide their documentation so that only existing logged in users can see it. I just think that's a marketing disaster and a very defensive approach. So I have seen companies do that in WordPress, which I think they're missing a trick. James Baldacchino 50:57-51:07 Not even we do that. We have our own wiki which speaks about how our processes work, etc., which is also public. So, yeah, I completely agree with you, Katie. Katie Keith 51:08-52:26 interesting and that's particularly extreme for you because you are providing services to people whereas we're talking about documentation for products that people are setting up themselves and hiding that behind a paywall but anyway let's move on to our best advice so we always close these shows by each coming up with our own one piece of best advice on the topic so mine would be that even if you can't afford to do this as a service with with ellipsis or something like that who will do it for you in a much more comprehensive way do something yourself so the way to do that I would say is to come up with your most important search terms or topics or whatever you want to call them and just stick them into the AI yourself in as neutral a way as possible as we discussed and also implement some things to make the user not have to think like James advised. So go to your most important content and optimize it. Does it directly answer the question without people needing to infer anything? Does it have easy self-contained sentences? Make it as easy as possible for both the AI and real people. So, James, what about you? What's your one top tip on all of this? James Baldacchino 52:28-53:25 Before you start optimizing, figure out what's most important and where you want to go. If you don't have a plan, you're just going to run into it blindly. So the most important first step is figuring out where you need to optimize towards which is most important when it comes to your product. I have some good news here. Katie, you mentioned that people might not have the budgets to work with us, etc. For the full service, some companies might not. However, we also have a product we created specifically for this reason, which is where we, for a very, very low price, give just the basic map of here's where you start, here's what you do next, here's what to do, and it will give you exactly what to focus on for the first 90 days, and it will give you results. So if you need a map, we can help with that as well. Katie Keith 53:26-53:28 So where can people get that? James Baldacchino 53:29-53:42 Just contact us on our website. The truth is I think the product page is currently under construction, but Alex is listening to this podcast. So knowing Alex, it will be out very soon. Katie Keith 53:43-53:47 Otherwise they can contact you. So it's not fully launched, but you can do that. James Baldacchino 53:47-54:01 It is. We're already offering it. But yeah, our sales is going through direct connections right now rather than the website. But again, I can bet you Alex is furiously typing it away right now. Zack Katz 54:01-54:03 It may be published, yeah. Katie Keith 54:04-54:05 Okay, and Zack? Zack Katz 54:05-54:44 One of the things we didn't cover today is 404 pages. We've talked about it on WP product talk in the past. AI, even if they know your product is the right solution, will make up URLs for what is the solution's direct link. So pay attention to your 404s. If you're not tracking them, track that. We use the built-in 404 tracker that's built into the redirection plugin, which we already use anyway. Find out what people, where AIs are sending. Pay very close attention because each one of those is a very hot lead that's ready to act. And it's probably something that you should prioritize. James Baldacchino 54:45-54:58 Kudos to Katie here who was the first one to point this out to me and it's really sage advice it's really clear advice on what people are landing on your site but maybe incorrectly Katie Keith 55:01-55:18 that discovered it and told me and then I kind of publicized it and I've recently heard somebody is going to release a product we talked about that and couldn't decide somebody is actually going to release a plugin that will do AI based redirects and things like that. So the world is Zack Katz 55:18-55:24 moving in that direction now. And Alex with Ellipsis says, Ellipsis is AI search audit product. James Baldacchino 55:25-55:29 It's what, it's the, it's the page I was referring to, because I didn't give the name. Katie Keith 55:29-55:40 So that's a search audit product. Yeah. All right. Well, that's a wrap. So James, thank you so much for helping us. Where can people find you online? James Baldacchino 55:43-55:49 on our website, getellipsis.com or just email me on james.getellipsis.com. I'll be happy to help. Zack Katz 55:51-56:11 Next week, Katie and Matt will be chatting with Leslie Sim from Event Coy about whether doing lifetime sales for new products are a huge growth opportunity or a trap that will damage your business in the long term. Put it in your calendar now, especially because there's a very exciting announcement at the end of that show. So make sure to watch all the way through. Katie Keith 56:14-56:28 Definitely. And special thanks to PostStatus for being our green room. If you're enjoying these shows, then do us a favor and hit like, subscribe, share it with your friends, reference it in your newsletters, and don't forget to tune in again next week. Bye. James Baldacchino 56:31-56:31 Thank you.