Jenna Hannon, Christian Klepp

Jenna Hannon  00:00

So in in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you were seeing a lot of hacks where people were using as many keywords as they could get to drive traffic, but whether that traffic was actually driving conversions was very difficult to measure. Now you’re asking, what is my customer prompting in AI? What questions are they going to AI to be answered during the research or buying phase to my solution, and that’s now your starting point. So you’re going from keywords to props.

Christian Klepp  00:27

Gartner predicts that traditional search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026, which means that one in four potential customers will no longer find businesses through Google. Despite this, many B2B companies are still using the same SEO playbook they’ve had for years, and now their organic visibility is dropping. So, how can they fix this, and what role can their marketing teams play? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers in the Mission podcast, and I’m your host Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Jenna Hannon, who will be answering this question, she’s the founder at Hatter, an organic marketing agency and platform that combines traditional search engine optimization with answer engine optimization. Let’s dive in. All right, here we are, Jenna Hannon. Welcome to the show.

Jenna Hannon  01:14

Hi, thanks for having me.

Christian Klepp  01:16

Jenna. Really great to have you on the show. I’m really looking forward to this conversation because, man, we have a lot to unpack. Okay, so let’s dive in.

Jenna Hannon  01:23

Sounds good.

Christian Klepp  01:24

Jenna, you are on a mission to help businesses get found on Google and AI search. So for this conversation, why don’t we focus on the following topic and unpack from there? How do you strategically increase your company’s visibility for AI search? A lot of people are talking about it. Not everybody is doing it the right way, and that’s where you come in, right? So let’s kick off this conversation with the following question. So many companies are running the same tired SEO playbook they’ve been using for years, and they’re watching their organic visibility drop. So in your experience, what are companies getting wrong about AI search? So that’s the first part of the question, and the second part of the question is: What are legacy strategies doing to make companies completely invisible to AI search engines?

Jenna Hannon  02:13

So let’s unpack that a little. I think the game has actually fully changed. So about a year ago in this whole industry, there was a lot of LinkedIn posts and talk about SEO is dead, and there’s the new game of answer engine optimization or generative engine optimization. So those are the acronyms you’re hearing: AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), AI search, all the same thing essentially. And I remember a year ago when I first read that, I would have said no. It’s kind of a combination of both. There’s SEO and there’s AEO, and I would look at those as a Venn diagram with a bunch of overlap. Now, with the latest announcements from Google to the full rollout of AI mode, I think we actually have made that transition from SEO to AEO, meaning 60% or so of searches on Google are now bringing up AI summaries, which means every business is now transitioned from SEO to AEO because Google has fundamentally shifted to AI search, so I think it’s important to start there. Now, how has this game changed? I would say the big difference from SEO to AEO is about specificity. It’s it’s from going broad to narrow. So in the game of SEO, it was all about traffic. How can we go and grab as much traffic for as many keywords as possible? And when someone was searching, they were typing in a keyword to the Google search bar, and that was the behavior that they were used to. Which means you would type in something quite broad, and then you would look through a list of results. Now what we’re seeing is someone is talking to a chatbot or Google as if it’s a person answering back to them, which means what you’re typing in there is actually quite specific. You’re typing in a specific question, looking for a specific answer because now you’re getting a summary versus a list of links that you can go through, and so the behavior has fundamentally changed of how someone is using search, which means how you respond to that behavior is now changing. So you’re no longer building a strategy around these broad keywords all looking for traffic. You are trying to get really specific and really narrow, you’re trying to get someone to come to your website for the exact questions where you are the right solution and you provide the right answer. So I think that does fundamentally change the entire strategy of this game, and we can get into that.

Christian Klepp  04:57

I really love how you set that up, and it really. Brings me back to what we were talking about before I hit record. You know about how I was sick, and one of the things is because you know you only spend so much time at the clinic with the doctor. So then I did my own research online, and I did in fact use this AI chatbot on Google, right? And and it’s exactly to your point. Like there were certain things that I really wanted to know. I didn’t want to know. I don’t want to know like things like okay, the the the broad definition of the the sickness that I’m having. I I wanted to know things like as an example, what should I avoid doing? What should I be mindful of? Right, and you know you just keep feeding that in there, and and the search engine then starts feeding me with specific answers and lists, and in these lists themselves, there are the links to all these different articles and blogs and platforms, etc. that provide even more detail. If I you know if I’m so inclined to like inform myself even further, right? So I think you’re absolutely right. Would you say that it’s almost like a natural like evolution because because you know you went from broad to being more specific because previously, as you said, right, try to rank for as many keywords as possible, but you know in in the effort of trying to rank for all those keywords, everything is still very spread out, right? You you haven’t quite narrowed the field down yet, right? So, would you say that that’s a natural like step in in you know in in this entire ecosystem, if we can call it that?

Jenna Hannon  06:31

Yeah, as a marketer, I think it’s a it’s a good thing. So, in SEO, you were seeing a lot of hacks where people were using as many keywords as they could get to drive traffic, but whether that traffic was actually driving conversions was very difficult to measure, and so I think there’s a lot of SEO work that is done that’s not driving actual conversions to the business just based on that keyword strategy, whereas now you’re getting rewarded in AI search engines for being very specific to what your business does, who it’s for, why they should care, and a lot of what you’re doing on your website is getting more and more specific to your audience because LLMs (Large Language Models) are very good at understanding context, and so if you are going too broad, it actually makes it harder for the large language models to understand what you do, who you’re for, and when you should come up. So that’s going to work against you. So going back to what you were saying initially about these old websites that were built for SEO becoming invisible, this is often what we see: is their websites are too broad, they’re for too many ICPs (Ideal Customer Profile), too many customers, and therefore the LLMs don’t know how to summarize these websites, and therefore they’re not showing up. Versus, we’re seeing a lot of smaller websites that are very specific around what they do, who they’re for, their specific niche, and that’s starting to show up a lot more than these these big websites. So anytime there’s an evolution to your point, or a new frontier in marketing, there’s always an opportunity.

Christian Klepp  08:08

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, great. So why don’t we segue from that to you know you mentioned how how it’s evolved right from SEO to like AEO and what what some of these companies are are getting wrong by using that old SEO playbook. So, why don’t you list or tell us about maybe like three things that they’re getting wrong and what should they be doing instead? What should they be doing to fix this issue?

Jenna Hannon  08:34

Yeah. So let me let me walk you through the basics of the playbook.

Christian Klepp  08:36

Sure.

Jenna Hannon  08:37

So and how they’ve changed from SEO. So the way that SEO worked is when when you got started, you would do research on keywords, and you would under try to understand what is my customer searching for, how how many searches are there on Google for that particular term, and can we rank for it? Now you’re asking, what is my customer prompting in AI? What questions are they going to AI to be answered during the research or buying phase to my solution, and that’s now your starting point. So you’re going from keywords to props. Then what you need to do is you need to translate those prompts into the unique answers where you can provide that answer. So these they should be very related to your business. You want them to be more commercial versus informational. When I say commercial, it’s is someone actually looking for your solution, and therefore you as the business are the answer to the problem that they’re typing in to an AI search bar, so your your content plans on your website should all be about your business. So this is back to core marketing, and you want to make sure that you’re covering those prompts. So when we start with working with a client, we’re often starting with 50 to 100 prompts that we think we can answer, and then we are sitting. Systematically, starting with their website to build out that content. So I think where the SEO game has changed is a lot of SEO was focused on oh, what is on the back end of your website, and then what is the actual content on your website that Google is reading. And Google was reading both. They were crawling your website for the technical pieces, and they’re also understanding the what is the actual content on each page. AI search is more about the content side because the LLMs are very good at crawling the content of your page and less the technical pieces of your website, and therefore it’s now moved from almost technical to content marketing. So that’s that’s a big piece of of how the playbooks change, and then a third piece that’s always been relevant in the playbook for SEO that’s now even more relevant in in AEO is what used to be backlinks. Backlinks were what are all the pages that are pointing to your website that are giving you this credibility that Google is deeming you an authority. The way that’s changed in the context of LLMs is because LLMs are very good at understanding the context of your business. They don’t look at as much as volume of links and more the content on the pages that are linking to you. And so, what we often see is driving more credibility for for businesses is trade publications, niche industry press. It’s not about the big ones anymore, and it’s not about volume. It’s about who is actually talking about you on the web. In fact, one of the number one drivers is your actual customer so reviews from your customers, your customers having conversations on places like Reddit or if you’re in software G2 these things tend to matter more than the sheer volume of back legs. So that’s kind of the how the playbook is is evolved in a in a nutshell. I know there’s a lot of pieces there.

Christian Klepp  12:00

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. But from what I’m understanding, you’re saying that it’s more quality over quantity, right? So you’re not implying that backlinks are no longer relevant. It’s just that the the volume of backlinks are not as relevant as they used to be. Correct.

Jenna Hannon  12:16

Correct, and it’s removed the hacks. So what was happening in the backlink world is people are essentially going and buying backlinks, and most SEO agencies you talk to have a have a backlink practice where they know how to go and buy backlinks. That has fundamentally gone away.

Christian Klepp  12:32

Which I suppose is a good thing, right? Because…

Jenna Hannon  12:34

I think so as a marketer.

Christian Klepp  12:36

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It’s it’s almost like some of these like some of these podcasts or YouTube channels that buy their number of followers, right?

Jenna Hannon  12:45

Exactly.

Christian Klepp  12:46

Yeah, if you can figure out how to get rid of that practice, that’d be great too. So we always hear about like how platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, you know, these platforms-they’ve got people who discuss real problems, right? They’re not just indexing websites, but we also know that like platforms such as Reddit, YouTube, and other third-party mentions, these guys are also driving a lot of AI search visibility. So again, two-prong question: Why do you think that is, and how do you think B2B brands can show up there authentically?

Jenna Hannon  13:21

Yeah, so it goes back to that playbook that I was talking about. There’s basically two main pieces in AI search. One is the language models need to understand what you do, who it’s for, the fundamental questions about your business. We call this your foundation, which is mainly your website. You need to answer the questions about the business that help LLMs understand who you are, and then two, they understand how credible you are based on the content around the web that reinforces the information on your website. Most businesses don’t have the foundation, the first piece. Most businesses don’t answer all of the questions that their prospective buyer is typing into an AI chatbot that they should come up as part of the answer. So, for most, I would say 90 some percent of businesses need to focus on their website and answering those questions and making sure that they are building the content to teach the LLMs what they do. Then the second piece is is what you just mentioned: is how credible are you according to the LLMs based on the other information on the web about you? This could be people talking about you on Reddit, your reviews, your comments on Google Business Profile, social media. But what we normally see when we run an audit on a business, so what we’ll do is we’ll put in that business and we’ll put in their competitors, and we’ll we’ll see where the answers are coming from for the props that they care about showing up in. Most of the time, it’s the websites. It’s the first party content of the businesses. Every once in a while, we will see it from places like Reddit. You see Wikipedia quite a bit, but it’s not the same as the what you’re reading online. Of everyone’s got to do this for a while. It was everyone’s got to do Reddit. What we see is there’s certain businesses where Reddit is disproportionately influential. Those are often e-commerce businesses, consumer-based businesses where there’s conversations about that product on Reddit. The same thing for YouTube. There was a phase recently of oh, it’s all about YouTube. We have yet to see YouTube come up as one of the top influential websites for AI answers within a particular business niche. So these are all helpful, but if the LLMs don’t fundamentally understand what your business does because it’s not on your website or anywhere on the web that you wrote. It’s unlikely that these other places online are going to help LLMs understand.

Christian Klepp  16:10

Yeah, you know, you made me think about something, and it’s something that I see even with some of the clients that we work with, and and this might be part of the problem. You know, like a lot of companies out there, their websites are, for lack of a better description, it’s a big product catalog, right? To your point, they don’t really answer the question of like, okay, do I really understand who my customer is, and what challenges and problems they have, and how we, as the service provider or the or the company that has the product, that we are the solution that they’re looking for that will help them to solve that problem. And what what what we usually what I see a lot of out there is the company talking about how awesome they are and look how great our product is and you know, like SaaS companies, look at look at all these amazing features, but they don’t actually answer the question that somebody would have if I’m if I’m somebody that’s looking for an accounting software. I’m just going to throw that example out there, right? That’s going to help me save time, issue invoices, and I can do everything on a single platform without having to hop around. I can import files and everything harmonizes, right? But instead of but instead of answering those questions, they’re just talking about how great their company is and how look look at all these awesome features, right? So do you think that that’s part of the problem?

Jenna Hannon  17:38

Big time. So this is this is I come from a product marketing background, so this is this is where the fun part is for me in the game of AEO. Is in order to show up in those recommendations, it’s now a smaller peer set. So before an SEO, when you’re typing in a keyword, you’re going to get a long list, pages of lists of potential answers for you. Now you’re going to get a summary with three to five recommendations. So what that means is you need to be very clear on a who your peer set is and b how you were different, which is fundamentally product marketing because the LLMs are recommending you based on that differentiation, so a core part of your AI search strategy is understanding why your customer chooses you over your competitors, and all of your content needs to be built out from that, so that’s kind of your starting place to to give you some concrete strategies that we’ve done to answer those questions for for a business that we worked with that was a software for CFOs (Chief Financial Officer). We built out a whole section of their website that just goes down feature by feature to describe what that feature does, why it’s relevant, and and why it’s different than their competitors. Competitor A, B, and C doesn’t have this feature. Here’s how you use it for this specific use case, and we built a whole resource section that dug into their product, and then we built a whole section that just helped their prospective buyer understand the differences of that tool to their competitors, and so this is kind of the level of depth that you need to get to in terms of providing the answers to the AI search engines,

Christian Klepp  19:41

yeah, yeah, no, that’s absolutely right. Because especially when you’re talking about B2B which is, which is what the show is about, right? You’re you’re usually not like appealing to like a mass market audience, right? You’re appealing to specific members of a buying committee, and it’s usually a group of people, and they each have different roles and functions. Within the company, the organization, they have different mandates as well, so they they have different motivations for seeking out a solution, right? And and that’s where it gets tricky. But you know, at least from my experience, that’s also where I guess it’s a it’s a fun challenge to have too, right?

Jenna Hannon  20:16

True. I think the the the when the light bulb really went off for us was that customer came to us and they said the way that CFOs used to buy is that they would go to a procurement department and their procure they would say hey we have this problem we need some software to solve it and then procurement would go off and do research and then come back and present choices yeah

Christian Klepp  20:37

with some recommendations

Jenna Hannon  20:38

exactly so this business came to us and said we sell to CFOs, and what we’ve heard from CFOs is now they don’t do that anymore. They just go to ChatGPT or Claude, and they ask those questions directly. We have this problem. We’re looking for a software. They’re now evaluating each particular software through ChatGPT, and then they’re going to procurement and saying, “Hey, I would like to buy this product. And so for us, that was where the light bulb went off. Of AEO is now a game of educating your buyer through the buying process, through through the AI chatbots, and so by the time now they’re coming to you through the search, they’re actually ready to buy. So that that’s partly what I mean around answering those questions along the buyer journey, because now this the search is going so much deeper that someone’s actually making a buying decision, not just looking for options.

Christian Klepp  21:34

Exactly, exactly. Okay, let’s get into some tactics because you know on the show we love us some tactics, right? So, what are some specific tactics that actually build AI search visibility, and versus those that only look impressive in a monthly client report? And I know that you’ve talked about some of these already.

Jenna Hannon  21:52

Yeah, absolutely. So the things. Let’s start with the things I wouldn’t do.

Christian Klepp  21:56

Sure,

Jenna Hannon  21:56

I wouldn’t go off and build a multi-channel strategy. meaning we need to show up in AEO. Okay, we need to be doing LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, and we need to make changes on our website. What’s going to happen is you’re going to do a lot of those poorly because those are all expensive channels to invest in, and it’s not going to move the needle. So the best advice that I can give is to focus on the foundation, which is your website. So, getting into brass tacks, what the main tactic you want to start with is building out that resource section on your website that is meant to be your buyer journey. A lot of what we’re doing for the for our clients is getting through all of those client prospective buyer questions along that buyer journey. Now, if you take a software for a CFO, that’s a lot of content to get through. That’s they’re looking at features, they’re looking at use cases. There’s different ICPs. It’s a lot of what a content marketer and your your your your team that’s supporting sales is doing already, but it’s it’s it’s very specific content designed to show up in answers. So when you build out that plan, you need to know what questions you are trying to answer that you think your customer is typing in to the AI search bar. But yeah, I would say that that’s kind of the the the process. It’s find out what those questions are, create the content to answer them. Make sure it’s on the right place on your website and it’s properly optimized, and then repeat. And you are chipping away at that every single week because your your buyer is going to have a lot of questions throughout that journey. So it is quite a bit of content.

Christian Klepp  23:58

You know, as you were talking, it reminded me of something like: Have you ever done? Have you ever had or gone to acupuncture?

Jenna Hannon  24:06

I have not. No.

Christian Klepp  24:07

Have you not? But but you but you’ve heard of it, right? Like you know, of course.

Jenna Hannon  24:11

Yeah, yeah,

Christian Klepp  24:12

Yeah. It’s this ancient. It’s this ancient Chinese method of like you know where they where they stick needles in your body, and when you go into when you go into this these these places where they do acupuncture. They have a diagram there of your body, where everything is labeled, and especially essentially everything in your body has a pressure point, right? So where where you release like chi, which is which is like energy, right? And everything is connected somehow. Right, like if you’ve got like I’ll just give an example. If you’ve got like if you’ve got pain in your right arm, then it’s some it has something to do with the the blood flow and circulation on your in in your left arm, something of that nature. You’re probably thinking to yourself now, well, that’s all great, Christian, but. What does that actually have to do with B2B marketing? the The answer is that it’s almost like what you’ve been describing. It’s almost like thinking about the pressure points within within a client’s within a customer’s journey, the challenges and pain points that they’re having, right, and thinking about how those pain points, how the how that how those challenges, those problems impact their work, right, and and anticipating, okay, so if they have this problem, what are they going to do, right? So and and I think that’s a really good way to think about it because then you anticipate, okay, because they have this challenge, these are probably the questions that they are going to have, right? If they’re looking for a specific solution, this is probably what they’re going to be looking for. They probably have some kind of selection criteria, right? And I think you brought it up earlier. They’re going to have some green flags. They’re going to have some red flags, right? So all of these things combined, right? And and and I’m going back to use that term again, and I’ve probably said it a couple of times, but within this ecosystem of theirs, right? Because it’s all it’s it’s all in an ecosystem somehow, right? Our clients operate operate in an ecosystem where everything is somehow interconnected, right? So it’s so I think I think that was a really good that was a really good point to bring up, right? Okay, I’m gonna have to ask you the love it or hate it question, but I’m sure you’ll have no problem answering it. Metrics, right? And I know that we can go down a very deep rabbit hole with this one, but just give us some top level metrics here, especially if you’re talking about okay, telling B2B marketers and their teams, okay, this is how you improve your AI search visibility, and these are the things you should be looking out for. Because I mean, let’s be perfectly honest: saying things like we’re optimizing for the long term, that’s not gonna go down well with senior management, right? Like,

Jenna Hannon  27:05

You know what? This is why this this space is tough because just going back to tactics for a second.

Christian Klepp  27:10

Yeah,

Jenna Hannon  27:11

SEO has very clear tactics. It’s you’re gonna on page optimize. You’re gonna pick your keywords. You’re gonna do some keyword stuffing. There’s you’re gonna buy some backlinks. AEO is kind of going back to good marketing. It’s, do you know what you sell? Do you know why it’s better than your competition? Do you know how your buyer buys? And can you answer all of that on your website as if a person is going through and making that buying decision just from your website, they’re going through the entire journey on your website, and that’s your AEO playbook right there. So it’s it’s unfortunately not a quick list of tactics. The good news is the metrics are a little more clear. So going to your metrics question, so SEO was all about traffic. It’s it’s getting impressions on Google. Are those translating into clicks, which is translating into traffic, and how high are you ranking? Because the rank is going to dictate how many clicks you’re likely going to get. The problem with all those metrics is those are the leading indicators to help understand. Oh, am I getting visitors to my website? But all you actually care about in B2B marketing is leads. Are you driving more leads? So AI search has has some similarities. the The number one goal is leads. Most of the businesses that we work with measure that by asking on sales calls or asking through contact forms. How did you hear about us? And looking for ChatGPT Perplexity, or a Google summary. The leading indicators are your AI visibility. How often are you showing up for the queries that you care about compared to your competition? So what you’re looking for is a tool where you can put in your business and your competitors and see how you how visible you are compared to your competitors for queries that you care about. So you want to put in those queries yourself because you know your buyer, or you could go into Claude or ChatGPT and ask ask it what some of those things might be to just give you a jumping off point. Then, two, you’re looking for how often are you being mentioned. So your mention rate across your website. So these tools are going to tell you what pages are getting mentioned in AI search results and getting linked to in a in AI search results. If you are making progress in your AEO strategy, you should see more and more pages on your website starting to get mentioned in AI search. And this is a big one that people miss. Most people are just looking at their high level visibility, which is going to be a percentage. How how often in those answers are you showing up? And that’s kind of like a. Probability score – it’s very hard to move that number. Therefore, tracking that as a metric is not really going to tell you how well you’re doing. So, what you’re really looking for is that mention rate across your brand and across your website, and you’re looking to increase your your mention rate.

Christian Klepp  30:22

Got it. So obviously, link back to AI visibility and the mention rate across your brand and across your website. Okay, fantastic, fantastic, Jenna. Thank you so much for coming on the show and you know for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. Please, quick introduction to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you, especially if they need help with AI search visibility.

Jenna Hannon  30:45

Absolutely. So we are an AI search specific agency. We are a hybrid of a service and a software. So we also build proprietary tools. You can find us at GetHatter.AI. You can also find me on LinkedIn. I respond a lot to DMs. I write a lot about what I’m learning in AEO. So, if you’re looking to follow along, find me on LinkedIn. And lastly, I’ll mention we do give away a free tool. So, if you go to GetHatter.AI and you want to see where you sit in AI search results, we have a free way to do that.

Christian Klepp  31:21

Fantastic, fantastic! What a way to pull people in, huh? Like free tool…

Jenna Hannon  31:26

Absolutely. Well, it’s hard to get started if you don’t know where you stand.

Christian Klepp  31:30

Absolutely, absolutely, and and and you know, I think it would be very naive for people to think, okay, we’re probably doing well anyway, right? Like

Jenna Hannon  31:38

Exactly,

Christian Klepp  31:39

And you’ll be surprised what you find, right? So

Jenna Hannon  31:41

Absolutely,

Christian Klepp  31:42

once again. Jenna, thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe, and talk to you soon.

Jenna Hannon  31:47

Thanks, Christian. Appreciate it.

Christian Klepp  31:48

All right, bye for now.