TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Gloria: SEO is dead. Okay, just kidding. It’s not dead, but it fundamentally is changing, and AI search is the reason. Now, with over 800 million users on ChatGPT looking for anything from life advice to shopping, your product being recommended by AI will be make or break for your business this year. Now, SEO used to be something that you can trick, right? You can pad the keywords, you can do all the things, but AI understands context. It’s smarter than that. It understands reputation, and it understands the overall visual map of where your product stands. Most importantly, AI understands when something is manufactured versus when it’s real. So you don’t have to be the biggest brand on the internet. You don’t have to be in a big box store. You don’t even have to be the number one or number 10 seller on Etsy, but you do have to understand that trust layer is fundamentally what AI recommends. 

00:00:51 Gloria: And welcome back to the show. My name is Gloria Chou from Gloria Chou PR, and this is Small Business PR Podcast, where we make PR and marketing super accessible for the everyday small business owner. Now, I heard a quote recently from one of my business peers, and they said that SEO has changed more in the last year than it has in the last 10 years. And I absolutely believe that that’s true because now with Shopify integrating with ChatGPT, and now we have so many other things like Etsy and Walmart and Amazon, shoppers can now one-click and purchase and checkout within AI.

00:01:25 Gloria: So whether that’s ChatGPT or Gemini or Perplexity, you best believe that people are searching for products and which services and products to buy in the AI layer more than anything. And I think the biggest change is that instead of users self-selecting, which websites show up or which blog shows up, AI just gives them the answer. And we just trust that answer.

00:01:47 Gloria: And I’ll give you an example. So picture this. If you’re having a friendly banter with your friend or husband or spouse, and if you two are deciding who’s right or wrong, you pretty much just pull up your ChatGPT and ask it, and then you just trust that to be de facto authority, the answer, right? Same thing when it comes to our shopping decisions.

00:02:09 Gloria: And so the future of search and the future of the storefront is going to be who gets recommended on AI. And here are three things that you can do today to set yourself up, whether you’re a product or a service or an author so that you can be recommended on this layer that we’re all gonna be on, which is the AI shopping layer. 

00:02:27 Gloria: So the first thing you wanna do is prioritize PR. Now, I know it sounds obvious. I mean, this is the small business PR podcast. I’m the number one small business PR coach recommended by AI. But in the world of AI search, wanting to see if you’re trustworthy, it’s not gonna be about ads or how many followers you have on TikTok. It’s going to be, do you have backlinks? Have you been cited in a podcast? Have you been in an article? If you make a physical product, are you in roundups? Are you in a best of lists? All of those things are signaling to the AI algorithm that you are a real, trusted, reputable and authoritative brand. And you can sell a fidget spinner. You can sell children’s socks. It doesn’t matter. What they want to know is, are you being mentioned on multiple sources? So that’s the first thing.

00:03:13 Gloria: And the second thing is that people now, because they trust AI more, they’re not going to be necessarily convinced by just how many followers you have or how pretty your TikTok feed is, right? They’re going to want to know, is this validated by a third-party website? And there’s no better marker of that trust, of that validation than being cited in PR. And in fact, brands that are mentioned in the media, whether it’s podcasts or a shopping gift guide, are 300% more likely to show up on AI search. And that’s actually from ChatGPT directly. I actually asked ChatGPT. 

00:03:48 Gloria: So the little things that you do today, whether it’s one media mention or building up to that second one or third one, that is going to feed all of the algorithms, whether it’s Google, that then feeds into AI. So it’s the one thing that you can do to really compound. And when we talk about gift guides, I’m not just talking about Christmas time. I’m talking about there is a season for shoppers to buy products all year round whether it’s National Hot Sauce Day or Valentine’s Day or gifts for your grandpa or grandma. It’s not just Q4.

00:04:18 Gloria: Now, in our Get Featured Accelerator, we have people getting featured all year round because they know that the more that they can get those reputable PR mentions, whether it’s from a small blog or a big Oprah’s Favorite Things, and yes, we’ve had people get featured in Oprah’s Favorite Things, that is going to then feed the AI algorithms so that they have a much better chance of being visible in AI. So that’s really what I want you to know now. 

00:04:41 Gloria: And the brands that are actually focusing on this instead of pouring more money and time into Instagram that, by the way, disappears in 24 hours, those are the ones that are going to have that staying power because AI is deciding right now, as you’re hearing this, who to recommend and who not to recommend. And so the sooner that you get onto this AI train, which is getting PR, getting featured in the media, the sooner you can be ranked higher and higher and higher before your competitors. 

00:05:09 Gloria: Now, I say that right now, there is a huge golden window of opportunity, which is that small brands, whether it’s selling a solo candle, with whether you’re making something in your garage, you can compete with the big box brands who have millions of dollars and famous influencers. And the reason for that is because right now you cannot buy ads on ChatGPT. And it’s not about who is screaming the loudest into the void or this competition for who is the most popular. So right now is your golden opportunity to be able to still get featured and make the AI algorithms trust you just as much, if not more than those brands that have millions of dollars. 

00:05:44 Gloria: So this is kind of my plea to you is, you have a first mover advantage. The little things that you do now will cement your AI reputation for months, if not years to come. And it’s never been a better time to do PR because now we have free AI tools that actually does the grunt work for you. And that’s really what’s fundamentally changing about PR.

00:06:05 Gloria: I always say that PR agencies and kind of the way that they work is really kind of antiquated and kind of a thing in the past because now with AI, it does all of the media monitoring for you. It does all the search and research about what journalists are looking for. It gives you up-to-date stats about consumer trends. And actually in my AI PR masterclass, I show you exactly how to get featured using these free AI tools. My favorite is Perplexity.ai to find what journalists are writing about and tie your product, no matter how niche or how, you know, you think so many people have made it. Like, there is an angle for you.

00:06:41 Gloria: And so using Perplexity, using ChatGPT, you can absolutely get featured in places like HARO, Help a Reporter Out or a writer’s Substack, which are a blog that a lot of journalists are using to tell you what they’re writing this season. These are all free by the way, they’re not pay-to-play. And so the opportunity has never been easier and the barrier to entry has never been greater.

00:07:04 Gloria: So the future of search is changing. SEO as we know it is dying and is changing so rapidly with all these integrations. I think right now there’s six or seven different shopping e-commerce integrations. And I know that that number will only continue. So in the next three to six months, I really truly believe that we’re not even gonna go on Google anymore. We’re not going to look on blogs. We’re literally just going to type into our ChatGPT or our own agents, train on what we like of, hey, I wanna find this or I wanna buy this and you wanna set yourself up to be featured, to be recommended on AI and you do that with PR. 

00:07:39 Gloria: So this is just a quick and dirty about how SEO is changing forever. And look, no one knows what’s gonna happen in the future, right? But we know that SEO has changed from keyword stuffing to is this a person or a brand that I can recommend? And PR is a thing that gives you that trust signal.

00:07:58 Gloria: If you know of anyone who can benefit from this episode, any small business owners, please send them my way. And I really hope that you can get featured and that AI recommends you because you deserve to be seen just as much as those big box brands. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time.