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John Jantsch (00:00.664)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Eva Gutierrez. She is the founder of ThinkWithAI.com, a leading educator and consultant on practical AI adoption for business leaders with a background in behavioral science and communication. Ava’s methods empower companies to get more value out of AI, integrating it into decision-making, brainstorming, recruiting, and day-to-day workflows.

guess we’re going to talk about AI today. Ava, welcome to the show.

Eva Gutierrez (00:33.321)

I’m sure you haven’t been talking about AI a lot. It’s hardly getting brought up these days.

John Jantsch (00:38.958)

I kind of have a running joke with my guests to say, okay, we’re six minutes in and we haven’t mentioned AI yet, you so we better get to that, but you’re right off the bat. We, we’re going to go into it today. So let’s set the table. My, one of the things I think there was this period where it was all like whiz bang, like, my God, look at all this incredible stuff it can do and the future and you know, who’s going to lose their job. I mean, that seemed to be like all the conversation. And I feel like people are kind of settling in now and saying, well,

Eva Gutierrez (00:44.723)

Ha!

Eva Gutierrez (01:02.783)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (01:07.669)

Mm.

John Jantsch (01:08.334)

here’s what it can do, here’s what it can’t do. What do you find is kind of the biggest mindset shift that you think people need to make to look at this in the right way?

Eva Gutierrez (01:21.845)

Number one is how you’re thinking about AI supporting your work. So we tend to read the headlines exactly what you just mentioned of like, you might have a job today and tomorrow it’s gone. And all of this like really big macro thinking of AI is just going to take over tomorrow and that’s the end. And the reality is that I teach the founders and business operators that I work with is so much more tangible. What we look at is saying, hey,

John Jantsch (01:26.531)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (01:48.881)

AI is going to start taking over some of your work, but it’s going to do it task by task. And it’s your job as the human part of this AI relationship that you’re building with your new AI team members to be the one recognizing, okay, this is a task that I should offload to AI. And I say this because what AI allows for all of us is this hyper-personalization, especially as business owners or operators or people that really enjoy their jobs.

It’s the ability to say, I don’t want to do this thing, so I want AI to do it. And even though AI can do this thing, I still am going to do it. So it’s really focused on that task by task and within those tasks, not telling yourself that you have to give it to AI because AI can. It’s saying, what do I now have more time for that I wish I had time for that I can just give to AI and looking at it from a month by month basis.

John Jantsch (02:29.005)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (02:47.314)

What am I having or where am I recruiting AI to help me out this month? Task by task, like bring it way, way smaller. That’s when it becomes tangible and something you can actually create a plan around.

John Jantsch (03:01.198)

You know, it’s funny, I’ve owned my own business for 30 years, so I’ve seen a lot of these things come. And, you know, I remember, I feel like there’s a little parallel to when it all of a sudden became kind of trendy to get a virtual assistant. You know, right? And it was like, oh, I can get somebody from the Philippines to do this work for, you know, whatever, you know, rate. But they still had to figure out what that work was. You know, it wasn’t a magic pill. Right. And I think there’s, I know that

Eva Gutierrez (03:15.38)

Mmm

John Jantsch (03:31.138)

This is not a person doing the work, but I think there’s some parallels, aren’t there?

Eva Gutierrez (03:34.709)

absolutely. And this is the perfect way to set this up as well. What I teach people as well is saying when you go to offload that task to AI, I need you to picture AI as if it was a person and you just hired them. And bonus points is to give them a salary in your mind saying, I just hired this person. I’m paying them $2,000 a month. I just hired this business advisor. I’m paying them $8,000 a month to just talk to me and help me. Right. Put a number on there. This is for your mind.

John Jantsch (03:53.24)

Yes.

John Jantsch (04:01.122)

Mmm.

Eva Gutierrez (04:04.98)

Because what you want to do is now look at that situation and say, how much context would I give this new VA I hired in order to expect them to do this job well? And then in order to expect them to do this job extraordinarily well, right? At the end of the day, it’s the amount of context that you’re giving that person, right? How many SOPs? What about the context of the business and the products and all the things you’ve tried before and what’s working and what’s not working, right? Looking at AI the exact same way,

as you did when you went to hire that VA. I think we’ve all hired a VA, didn’t give them enough context, and then we’re like, man, they didn’t give me what I was looking back.

John Jantsch (04:43.106)

Well, they actually became a, they actually became a pain because you had to like think up stuff for him to do every day, right? Cause you hadn’t really planned it.

Eva Gutierrez (04:48.52)

Yep. Exactly. And so with AI, that’s exactly it as well. What we’re looking to do is say AI should take over your work, just task by task. Don’t make it any bigger than what it really is. It’s task by task. It’s the tasks that you want to offload. This is AI. Like you get to choose what you keep working on and you get to choose what you say. I would love AI to take that on. And then when you hire AI for that task, imagining it’s a person that you hired with a salary.

John Jantsch (04:59.522)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (05:18.192)

and saying how much context would I give to this person? What type of onboarding would I put them through? What would I make sure they have access to before I even let them start working on this project? That immediately helps you get way more success out of that experience with your new AI VA, for example.

John Jantsch (05:36.738)

So you’ve used the term several times and I was going to ask you about this. You intentionally used the term hiring AI. So maybe kind of unpack what you mean by that or how that’s different than people are typically engaging AI. Let’s put it

Eva Gutierrez (05:43.027)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (05:51.313)

Mm-hmm. So I use hiring AI for the human mind because a lot of AI takes just it’s all about reframing the way that we’re thinking about it, right? And we’ve all had conversations in chat to BT where you’re like, wow, this is the most brilliant, incredible thing that just happened. And we’ve also all had conversations in there where you’re like, I am so close to throwing my computer out the window because are you right? Exactly. Like, no, that wasn’t a good idea.

John Jantsch (06:13.774)

Stop agreeing with me.

Eva Gutierrez (06:20.754)

Right? And AI is like, you’re like the, you’re the most brilliant person that ever existed. And so that’s what we try to do here is instead of just like winging it and hoping that it gets the job done, it’s you reframing it in your mind to say, I am approaching this. Like I am hiring a person to do the job. And the only difference here is that AI has the ability to look through way more context than that person would.

And so instead of saying, I’m just going to try to figure out this AI use case, I’m going to just try to put it together. It’s you as the human in your mind saying, as I sit down to situate this, I am hiring AI for this role. I’m not just trying to see if it can work and taking it seriously because it’s however serious you take it is the output that you get.

John Jantsch (07:11.598)

So does this change how we think about the traditional org chart? I mean, when we used to hire a person, it was to fill a role, and that role did all these things. And in a lot of ways, are we saying, no, we want to hire specific AI tools to do specific tasks, and we might have 100 of them.

Eva Gutierrez (07:31.22)

Yes, it definitely changes the org chart. What I teach is this idea of you have the org chart if you’re a business owner, for example, of you up top. And then normally you would have had like employees under you, right? Now you have you up top. You have a bunch of your own AI. Let’s just call them agents for now as a placeholder word here. A bunch of little AI agents that can do a bunch of tasks for you. But you still have your team underneath that. And then your team under each of one of them, they have a bunch of agents that are underneath.

John Jantsch (07:49.452)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:59.832)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (08:01.032)

them. Because if we just look at an org chart and then start to say what is the task that each person has to do every day, that’s where we start to go back to the beginning here and we say, okay, let’s start bringing AI support in as much as possible for each of those tasks and looking at that support, not just in terms of can it do the task, right? It shouldn’t just be an assistant, but while it’s hypothetically over there.

Why doesn’t it also be a strategist and help you strategize something that you hadn’t thought of previously with this new context? And then why doesn’t it also act as an advisor while it’s doing that thing too? And looking at the bigger picture of the goals of the company and making sure that this is aligned to them. So looking at hiring those AI agents for everybody with the goal of not saying we should replace our whole team, but the whole team can be monumentally enhanced if they have this AI assistant strategist and advisor.

helping them see what they previously couldn’t see.

John Jantsch (08:58.742)

So does it then, as I listen to you describe that, in my experience, even working with our own team, is it really kind of changes what their role is as well. mean, you talk about these agents, they’re much more of a manager in a lot of ways, managing the agents or managing the output, directing, overseeing, strategizing. so does, while I think that people are getting that,

Eva Gutierrez (09:08.584)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:26.478)

Does that cause some disruption inside of organization where you’ve got a bunch of doers?

Eva Gutierrez (09:32.055)

Yes and no. So I think what happens here is if we were to think about two, three years ago, we look at AI and we couldn’t even fathom where we would be, right? 2023, ChatDBT just comes out. There’s a lot of question of how good is it going to be at things? How smart can it get? Right? And it was hard to predict, okay, here’s where we are now going to be. Here’s what the future looks like. And I feel that same sense today.

John Jantsch (09:39.491)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:43.843)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:51.34)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (09:59.518)

that it’s extremely difficult to predict and say, here is where we will be. Because we hadn’t even predicted that AI would be such a big part of the workforce like four or five years ago. And so to me, it’s so much more about just getting there and then saying, okay, now what is the plan based on where AI is and what its capabilities are and what people are interested in doing and how people and AI come together in this hybrid intelligence? Like where’s our role now? It’s gonna be different than it was two years ago.

John Jantsch (10:08.76)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (10:28.979)

today in a few years.

John Jantsch (10:31.758)

Explain what you mean by hybrid intelligence because I know that that was something I was going to ask you about because I know you’ve talked about that before so explain where that fits.

Eva Gutierrez (10:42.643)

So I love this term hybrid intelligence. I’ve been shouting it from the rooftops for two years now since 2023 when I read this incredible book called the intuitive executive. It’s a textbook and it inside it talked about this idea of hybrid intelligence, which means humans will always be central to decision making with AI in a complimentary supporting role.

And so when we look to saying, all right, let’s have AI come in and help us as people, whether you’re a business owner, whether you’re an employee, whether you’re a consultant, whether you’re an advisor, what we’re really doing is creating a hybrid intelligent relationship. I have a relationship with AI where it supports me a certain way. You have a relationship with AI where it supports you a slightly different way. We’re both business owners, so it’s pretty aligned, but there are still different things there that it’s supporting us with. And that’s what’s going to happen across that org chart as well.

That’s when I start to say, well, you know what? It’s pretty difficult to predict where we’re going because the AI support that I need as a business owner is much different than the AI support that maybe my virtual assistant needs. And so as we start to predict these things, it becomes more of a question of, well, at certain roles, what does that change look like? Instead of deciding that there’s going to be this one big macro change.

John Jantsch (11:59.64)

So do you see a window, not necessarily a trend, but a window here where companies will say, I get what you’re talking about. I want to hire that recruiting agency that does this work. Just like, you know, recruiting or people that place, you know, VA’s. Do you see that that’s an opportunity, a business opportunity for people to actually come in and do this for companies?

Eva Gutierrez (12:22.875)

You mean like bringing in AI support, helping them set up on.

John Jantsch (12:25.79)

Yeah, actually be the one that defines the role and then trains and then, you know, installs it, so to speak. Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (12:29.587)

absolutely. There are a lot of AI agencies these days that are ready to audit and install whatever it is that you’re looking for. What I tend to push back on here, and there is a time and a place for this, don’t get me wrong, if it’s an incredibly complex setup, you should hire somebody to situate it. But I think one of the most important things that all of us should know right now is the skill set of AI.

Because to me, this is kind of like saying, let’s say it’s like 1999, 2000, right? And you’re saying, I’m just going to hire someone that knows how to use a computer. And then I’m just going to tell them what I want to do on the computer for my business. To me, I’m like, that doesn’t sound that smart, right? And that’s where we are now, I believe, where you don’t want to just say, well, they know how to use AI.

John Jantsch (13:10.04)

Okay.

Yeah. Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (13:24.027)

You want to be able to say, they can build out something super complicated that would take me hours and hours and it’s not worth figuring out. There is totally that use case, but the skillset of AI, I don’t believe is something that is just like something you outsource. It’s something to say, I’m going to take some time to learn this. And the thing about AI is that it is just a skillset. And so what is the difference between someone that has a skillset and doesn’t? And that is literally just the amount of hours that they have put in.

to learning that thing, right? And so all of us have the capability of learning the skillset of AI and just learning the foundational skillset that you need. Once you know that, then you can start to understand, this new platform came out. It’s actually not useful to me because of X, Y, and Z. this new Chat GPT feature is out. This is awesome for us because of A, B, and C. That’s when you can really start to figure out, okay, this is what I should learn how to do. This is what I should set up.

John Jantsch (14:11.384)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (14:23.088)

and then here’s the complicated stuff to bring to somebody else.

John Jantsch (14:26.798)

Yeah, it’s funny. parallel for me, you know, is in SEO. A lot of people are like, I don’t know how to do SEO. I’m just going to hire somebody to do it. And I always tell people, look, you have to you have to actually be smart enough or know enough about SEO in order to buy it. And I think that that’s kind of the parallel, because otherwise you’re going to get ripped off by people that are selling you stuff that’s not really going to be your thing. But you’re just like, I don’t get that stuff. You do it. So I totally agree. So.

Eva Gutierrez (14:35.26)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (14:42.45)

Mm.

John Jantsch (14:58.168)

How does somebody go about, and you’ve kind of hinted at it, think, to the first step is get stuff you don’t like to do off your plate, right? But how do you go about as a business, let’s say you’ve got 10, 12 employees that probably could all benefit in their job functions in some way. How do you go about kind of structuring what our plan’s gonna be? Because I think if you just, I see a lot of companies just, couple of their people are dabbling in it because they like that stuff. And so they’re using it this way and this way and the.

Eva Gutierrez (15:18.812)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (15:23.794)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (15:27.594)

owner of the business hates it. So they’re like, I don’t care what they do with that kind of, mean, how do you like have a comprehensive plan that’s really going to serve the business well?

Eva Gutierrez (15:36.306)

So I’ll answer this in two parts. The first part here is that I’ve talked to business leaders and I’ve talked to their teams, separate conversations. And if you are a business leader, I can promise you your team wants you to give them guidance on how to use AI because they don’t want to spend their time, their nights and weekends going through some course that they had to buy themselves in order to be able to do this. Right. This is learning and development. They are waiting for you to say,

John Jantsch (15:44.28)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:00.376)

Yeah, yeah, yep.

Eva Gutierrez (16:06.395)

here’s how we’re going to start learning about AI and how we’re going to bring it into the workspace. So it’s a really important thing for leaders to know right now. Your team isn’t going to raise their hand and say, I don’t really know how to use it well, because what benefit does that give them? So it’s creating this awkward tension where the business leaders are like, we want you to use AI more. Please go use it more. We’re more than happy. We’ll pay $200 a month for a chat GPT enterprise account for you. And then the team is using it as glorified Google search.

John Jantsch (16:18.552)

Yeah. Right, right, right, right.

John Jantsch (16:34.7)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (16:35.1)

So as a business leader, like however you want to go about it, just make sure that you’re giving your team guidance and courses and teaching them, hey, here’s the skillset of AI, instead of just saying, go use it and you figure out how to do it. So that’s step one. Step two here, we get a bit meta. This is something that I teach in my AI First Business system, is that what you can do is just tell AI what you do all day and then have AI give you an opportunity map that says,

John Jantsch (16:47.01)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (17:03.132)

Hey, here’s where you can use me. Here’s where you can use me at the assistant strategist and advisor level. So what I teach in that AI first business system is essentially recruiting AI to tell you where to hire AI. And then again, now you have task by task. You can say, okay, you know what? I hate doing this one task every day. Let me prioritize situating that and having AI support with that. Or being able to say AI is helping at the assistant and strategist level of this one task.

John Jantsch (17:03.502)

I like that.

John Jantsch (17:15.746)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (17:31.516)

But if we just made this one little tweak, it could actually now be an advisor as well within that whole task. And now we’re getting so much more information. We’re making better decisions. We’re more prepared, for example. That’s the way that I see it. So leaders making sure that you’re giving your team actual guidance and a plan as to how to use it because they are asking for it. They’re begging you for it, but they don’t want to raise their hand and say it. And then two, create that opportunity map.

John Jantsch (17:54.254)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (17:59.344)

Go through and tell AI what you do every day and have AI tell you where it can help.

John Jantsch (18:05.184)

So you use the term using AI for recruiting. I may have messed that up. You may have done it the other way around. explain kind of what, I know what you mean by that, but I think you kind of went by it. So I want you to kind of specifically highlight that idea.

Eva Gutierrez (18:20.464)

Yeah, so, and this kind of puts me out of a job hilariously when I give this advice, right? Because I help people figure out where to add AI to their work, but at the end of the day, the best thing I can do is actually teach you the skillset of AI, which is this hybrid intelligent relationship where you’re going to rely on AI to help you move forward with AI. So you can go into ChatGPT and say, hey, here’s everything that I do every day.

John Jantsch (18:26.062)

You

John Jantsch (18:45.133)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (18:45.836)

Here’s where I use AI support. Here’s where I don’t use AI support. Here are the tools that I’m using. Here are the tools that I kind of want to use, but I’m not using. And what it can do is create this opportunity map for you. I have a full workflow of this whole thing, but you can duct tape it together, of course, and be able to have AI just say, here’s all the tasks that you do every day. Here’s how AI could help at the assistant level. Here’s how it can help at the strategist level. Here’s how it can help at the advisor level.

John Jantsch (18:59.074)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (19:12.122)

And so what you’ve really done is just upgrade AI into your recruiter, right? Because you haven’t hired AI to do any of those things yet. You’ve just essentially told AI, can you come audit my business and then tell me who I should hire and where it would be the most helpful? But instead of being like, well, you need a full-time salary role here, you need this over here, we get to do it a little bit differently in this case and just go task by task.

John Jantsch (19:38.006)

And I think what you just shared right there is really the biggest mindset shift, you know, because I do think a lot of people look at a chat GPT window and say, I need to tell it what to do. You know, I need to tell it to give me this output. And I think a lot of times they really struggle because they don’t know what they don’t know. And so I think just this idea of asking it first is such a mindset shift.

Eva Gutierrez (19:43.078)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (20:03.986)

Exactly. And that’s really all AI is if you start to think about it, right? It’s a mindset shift to say, okay, I just need to start to bring this on task by task. It’s a mind shift to say, you know what I’m going to do here? I’m going to give it as much context and maybe more context than I normally give someone that I hire for the role. It’s all of these reframes that are the reason that it’s like a hybrid intelligent thing.

John Jantsch (20:09.102)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (20:31.829)

This is a relationship we’re building where we’re learning who AI needs us to be in order for AI to be exactly what we want it to be. And the thing about AI, and I talk about this all the time, say AI is like a golden retriever. It’s ready to go whenever you’re ready to go. It’s like, where are we going? To the kitchen? Awesome, I couldn’t be more excited. Are we going on a walk? I cannot wait. You just tell me where you want to go, because let’s go over there. I don’t even care. And it’s our job to put the constraints on it.

and to say, is awesome, I love having intelligence on demand, but my role as the human part of this hybrid intelligence is to constantly put the guardrails on intelligence on demand and force it to funnel this intelligence through the specific guardrails that I need for this specific task or this thing I wanna think through or a workflow that I’m building out. So it’s our job in order to do that. And that is like the macro reframe that we all need.

John Jantsch (21:28.046)

Yeah, and it’s my hope, we never know, but it’s my hope that that’s the 5 % we need to guard, right? And own as humans because that’ll become our job. Well, Ava, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d invite people to connect with you and learn about your work?

Eva Gutierrez (21:33.947)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (21:45.605)

Yeah, you can go to thinkwithai.com and that’s where I have that AI first business system as well as I’m building out some really cool stuff with Notion agents right now that I am so stoked about. So you can check everything out over there.

John Jantsch (21:55.726)

Awesome again. Well, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Eva Gutierrez (22:04.242)

Likewise, John. Nice to meet you.

John Jantsch (00:00.664)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Eva Gutierrez. She is the founder of ThinkWithAI.com, a leading educator and consultant on practical AI adoption for business leaders with a background in behavioral science and communication. Ava’s methods empower companies to get more value out of AI, integrating it into decision-making, brainstorming, recruiting, and day-to-day workflows.

guess we’re going to talk about AI today. Ava, welcome to the show.

Eva Gutierrez (00:33.321)

I’m sure you haven’t been talking about AI a lot. It’s hardly getting brought up these days.

John Jantsch (00:38.958)

I kind of have a running joke with my guests to say, okay, we’re six minutes in and we haven’t mentioned AI yet, you so we better get to that, but you’re right off the bat. We, we’re going to go into it today. So let’s set the table. My, one of the things I think there was this period where it was all like whiz bang, like, my God, look at all this incredible stuff it can do and the future and you know, who’s going to lose their job. I mean, that seemed to be like all the conversation. And I feel like people are kind of settling in now and saying, well,

Eva Gutierrez (00:44.723)

Ha!

Eva Gutierrez (01:02.783)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (01:07.669)

Mm.

John Jantsch (01:08.334)

here’s what it can do, here’s what it can’t do. What do you find is kind of the biggest mindset shift that you think people need to make to look at this in the right way?

Eva Gutierrez (01:21.845)

Number one is how you’re thinking about AI supporting your work. So we tend to read the headlines exactly what you just mentioned of like, you might have a job today and tomorrow it’s gone. And all of this like really big macro thinking of AI is just going to take over tomorrow and that’s the end. And the reality is that I teach the founders and business operators that I work with is so much more tangible. What we look at is saying, hey,

John Jantsch (01:26.531)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (01:48.881)

AI is going to start taking over some of your work, but it’s going to do it task by task. And it’s your job as the human part of this AI relationship that you’re building with your new AI team members to be the one recognizing, okay, this is a task that I should offload to AI. And I say this because what AI allows for all of us is this hyper-personalization, especially as business owners or operators or people that really enjoy their jobs.

It’s the ability to say, I don’t want to do this thing, so I want AI to do it. And even though AI can do this thing, I still am going to do it. So it’s really focused on that task by task and within those tasks, not telling yourself that you have to give it to AI because AI can. It’s saying, what do I now have more time for that I wish I had time for that I can just give to AI and looking at it from a month by month basis.

John Jantsch (02:29.005)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (02:47.314)

What am I having or where am I recruiting AI to help me out this month? Task by task, like bring it way, way smaller. That’s when it becomes tangible and something you can actually create a plan around.

John Jantsch (03:01.198)

You know, it’s funny, I’ve owned my own business for 30 years, so I’ve seen a lot of these things come. And, you know, I remember, I feel like there’s a little parallel to when it all of a sudden became kind of trendy to get a virtual assistant. You know, right? And it was like, oh, I can get somebody from the Philippines to do this work for, you know, whatever, you know, rate. But they still had to figure out what that work was. You know, it wasn’t a magic pill. Right. And I think there’s, I know that

Eva Gutierrez (03:15.38)

Mmm

John Jantsch (03:31.138)

This is not a person doing the work, but I think there’s some parallels, aren’t there?

Eva Gutierrez (03:34.709)

absolutely. And this is the perfect way to set this up as well. What I teach people as well is saying when you go to offload that task to AI, I need you to picture AI as if it was a person and you just hired them. And bonus points is to give them a salary in your mind saying, I just hired this person. I’m paying them $2,000 a month. I just hired this business advisor. I’m paying them $8,000 a month to just talk to me and help me. Right. Put a number on there. This is for your mind.

John Jantsch (03:53.24)

Yes.

John Jantsch (04:01.122)

Mmm.

Eva Gutierrez (04:04.98)

Because what you want to do is now look at that situation and say, how much context would I give this new VA I hired in order to expect them to do this job well? And then in order to expect them to do this job extraordinarily well, right? At the end of the day, it’s the amount of context that you’re giving that person, right? How many SOPs? What about the context of the business and the products and all the things you’ve tried before and what’s working and what’s not working, right? Looking at AI the exact same way,

as you did when you went to hire that VA. I think we’ve all hired a VA, didn’t give them enough context, and then we’re like, man, they didn’t give me what I was looking back.

John Jantsch (04:43.106)

Well, they actually became a, they actually became a pain because you had to like think up stuff for him to do every day, right? Cause you hadn’t really planned it.

Eva Gutierrez (04:48.52)

Yep. Exactly. And so with AI, that’s exactly it as well. What we’re looking to do is say AI should take over your work, just task by task. Don’t make it any bigger than what it really is. It’s task by task. It’s the tasks that you want to offload. This is AI. Like you get to choose what you keep working on and you get to choose what you say. I would love AI to take that on. And then when you hire AI for that task, imagining it’s a person that you hired with a salary.

John Jantsch (04:59.522)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (05:18.192)

and saying how much context would I give to this person? What type of onboarding would I put them through? What would I make sure they have access to before I even let them start working on this project? That immediately helps you get way more success out of that experience with your new AI VA, for example.

John Jantsch (05:36.738)

So you’ve used the term several times and I was going to ask you about this. You intentionally used the term hiring AI. So maybe kind of unpack what you mean by that or how that’s different than people are typically engaging AI. Let’s put it

Eva Gutierrez (05:43.027)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (05:51.313)

Mm-hmm. So I use hiring AI for the human mind because a lot of AI takes just it’s all about reframing the way that we’re thinking about it, right? And we’ve all had conversations in chat to BT where you’re like, wow, this is the most brilliant, incredible thing that just happened. And we’ve also all had conversations in there where you’re like, I am so close to throwing my computer out the window because are you right? Exactly. Like, no, that wasn’t a good idea.

John Jantsch (06:13.774)

Stop agreeing with me.

Eva Gutierrez (06:20.754)

Right? And AI is like, you’re like the, you’re the most brilliant person that ever existed. And so that’s what we try to do here is instead of just like winging it and hoping that it gets the job done, it’s you reframing it in your mind to say, I am approaching this. Like I am hiring a person to do the job. And the only difference here is that AI has the ability to look through way more context than that person would.

And so instead of saying, I’m just going to try to figure out this AI use case, I’m going to just try to put it together. It’s you as the human in your mind saying, as I sit down to situate this, I am hiring AI for this role. I’m not just trying to see if it can work and taking it seriously because it’s however serious you take it is the output that you get.

John Jantsch (07:11.598)

So does this change how we think about the traditional org chart? I mean, when we used to hire a person, it was to fill a role, and that role did all these things. And in a lot of ways, are we saying, no, we want to hire specific AI tools to do specific tasks, and we might have 100 of them.

Eva Gutierrez (07:31.22)

Yes, it definitely changes the org chart. What I teach is this idea of you have the org chart if you’re a business owner, for example, of you up top. And then normally you would have had like employees under you, right? Now you have you up top. You have a bunch of your own AI. Let’s just call them agents for now as a placeholder word here. A bunch of little AI agents that can do a bunch of tasks for you. But you still have your team underneath that. And then your team under each of one of them, they have a bunch of agents that are underneath.

John Jantsch (07:49.452)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:59.832)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (08:01.032)

them. Because if we just look at an org chart and then start to say what is the task that each person has to do every day, that’s where we start to go back to the beginning here and we say, okay, let’s start bringing AI support in as much as possible for each of those tasks and looking at that support, not just in terms of can it do the task, right? It shouldn’t just be an assistant, but while it’s hypothetically over there.

Why doesn’t it also be a strategist and help you strategize something that you hadn’t thought of previously with this new context? And then why doesn’t it also act as an advisor while it’s doing that thing too? And looking at the bigger picture of the goals of the company and making sure that this is aligned to them. So looking at hiring those AI agents for everybody with the goal of not saying we should replace our whole team, but the whole team can be monumentally enhanced if they have this AI assistant strategist and advisor.

helping them see what they previously couldn’t see.

John Jantsch (08:58.742)

So does it then, as I listen to you describe that, in my experience, even working with our own team, is it really kind of changes what their role is as well. mean, you talk about these agents, they’re much more of a manager in a lot of ways, managing the agents or managing the output, directing, overseeing, strategizing. so does, while I think that people are getting that,

Eva Gutierrez (09:08.584)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:26.478)

Does that cause some disruption inside of organization where you’ve got a bunch of doers?

Eva Gutierrez (09:32.055)

Yes and no. So I think what happens here is if we were to think about two, three years ago, we look at AI and we couldn’t even fathom where we would be, right? 2023, ChatDBT just comes out. There’s a lot of question of how good is it going to be at things? How smart can it get? Right? And it was hard to predict, okay, here’s where we are now going to be. Here’s what the future looks like. And I feel that same sense today.

John Jantsch (09:39.491)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:43.843)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:51.34)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (09:59.518)

that it’s extremely difficult to predict and say, here is where we will be. Because we hadn’t even predicted that AI would be such a big part of the workforce like four or five years ago. And so to me, it’s so much more about just getting there and then saying, okay, now what is the plan based on where AI is and what its capabilities are and what people are interested in doing and how people and AI come together in this hybrid intelligence? Like where’s our role now? It’s gonna be different than it was two years ago.

John Jantsch (10:08.76)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (10:28.979)

today in a few years.

John Jantsch (10:31.758)

Explain what you mean by hybrid intelligence because I know that that was something I was going to ask you about because I know you’ve talked about that before so explain where that fits.

Eva Gutierrez (10:42.643)

So I love this term hybrid intelligence. I’ve been shouting it from the rooftops for two years now since 2023 when I read this incredible book called the intuitive executive. It’s a textbook and it inside it talked about this idea of hybrid intelligence, which means humans will always be central to decision making with AI in a complimentary supporting role.

And so when we look to saying, all right, let’s have AI come in and help us as people, whether you’re a business owner, whether you’re an employee, whether you’re a consultant, whether you’re an advisor, what we’re really doing is creating a hybrid intelligent relationship. I have a relationship with AI where it supports me a certain way. You have a relationship with AI where it supports you a slightly different way. We’re both business owners, so it’s pretty aligned, but there are still different things there that it’s supporting us with. And that’s what’s going to happen across that org chart as well.

That’s when I start to say, well, you know what? It’s pretty difficult to predict where we’re going because the AI support that I need as a business owner is much different than the AI support that maybe my virtual assistant needs. And so as we start to predict these things, it becomes more of a question of, well, at certain roles, what does that change look like? Instead of deciding that there’s going to be this one big macro change.

John Jantsch (11:59.64)

So do you see a window, not necessarily a trend, but a window here where companies will say, I get what you’re talking about. I want to hire that recruiting agency that does this work. Just like, you know, recruiting or people that place, you know, VA’s. Do you see that that’s an opportunity, a business opportunity for people to actually come in and do this for companies?

Eva Gutierrez (12:22.875)

You mean like bringing in AI support, helping them set up on.

John Jantsch (12:25.79)

Yeah, actually be the one that defines the role and then trains and then, you know, installs it, so to speak. Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (12:29.587)

absolutely. There are a lot of AI agencies these days that are ready to audit and install whatever it is that you’re looking for. What I tend to push back on here, and there is a time and a place for this, don’t get me wrong, if it’s an incredibly complex setup, you should hire somebody to situate it. But I think one of the most important things that all of us should know right now is the skill set of AI.

Because to me, this is kind of like saying, let’s say it’s like 1999, 2000, right? And you’re saying, I’m just going to hire someone that knows how to use a computer. And then I’m just going to tell them what I want to do on the computer for my business. To me, I’m like, that doesn’t sound that smart, right? And that’s where we are now, I believe, where you don’t want to just say, well, they know how to use AI.

John Jantsch (13:10.04)

Okay.

Yeah. Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (13:24.027)

You want to be able to say, they can build out something super complicated that would take me hours and hours and it’s not worth figuring out. There is totally that use case, but the skillset of AI, I don’t believe is something that is just like something you outsource. It’s something to say, I’m going to take some time to learn this. And the thing about AI is that it is just a skillset. And so what is the difference between someone that has a skillset and doesn’t? And that is literally just the amount of hours that they have put in.

to learning that thing, right? And so all of us have the capability of learning the skillset of AI and just learning the foundational skillset that you need. Once you know that, then you can start to understand, this new platform came out. It’s actually not useful to me because of X, Y, and Z. this new Chat GPT feature is out. This is awesome for us because of A, B, and C. That’s when you can really start to figure out, okay, this is what I should learn how to do. This is what I should set up.

John Jantsch (14:11.384)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (14:23.088)

and then here’s the complicated stuff to bring to somebody else.

John Jantsch (14:26.798)

Yeah, it’s funny. parallel for me, you know, is in SEO. A lot of people are like, I don’t know how to do SEO. I’m just going to hire somebody to do it. And I always tell people, look, you have to you have to actually be smart enough or know enough about SEO in order to buy it. And I think that that’s kind of the parallel, because otherwise you’re going to get ripped off by people that are selling you stuff that’s not really going to be your thing. But you’re just like, I don’t get that stuff. You do it. So I totally agree. So.

Eva Gutierrez (14:35.26)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (14:42.45)

Mm.

John Jantsch (14:58.168)

How does somebody go about, and you’ve kind of hinted at it, think, to the first step is get stuff you don’t like to do off your plate, right? But how do you go about as a business, let’s say you’ve got 10, 12 employees that probably could all benefit in their job functions in some way. How do you go about kind of structuring what our plan’s gonna be? Because I think if you just, I see a lot of companies just, couple of their people are dabbling in it because they like that stuff. And so they’re using it this way and this way and the.

Eva Gutierrez (15:18.812)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (15:23.794)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (15:27.594)

owner of the business hates it. So they’re like, I don’t care what they do with that kind of, mean, how do you like have a comprehensive plan that’s really going to serve the business well?

Eva Gutierrez (15:36.306)

So I’ll answer this in two parts. The first part here is that I’ve talked to business leaders and I’ve talked to their teams, separate conversations. And if you are a business leader, I can promise you your team wants you to give them guidance on how to use AI because they don’t want to spend their time, their nights and weekends going through some course that they had to buy themselves in order to be able to do this. Right. This is learning and development. They are waiting for you to say,

John Jantsch (15:44.28)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:00.376)

Yeah, yeah, yep.

Eva Gutierrez (16:06.395)

here’s how we’re going to start learning about AI and how we’re going to bring it into the workspace. So it’s a really important thing for leaders to know right now. Your team isn’t going to raise their hand and say, I don’t really know how to use it well, because what benefit does that give them? So it’s creating this awkward tension where the business leaders are like, we want you to use AI more. Please go use it more. We’re more than happy. We’ll pay $200 a month for a chat GPT enterprise account for you. And then the team is using it as glorified Google search.

John Jantsch (16:18.552)

Yeah. Right, right, right, right.

John Jantsch (16:34.7)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (16:35.1)

So as a business leader, like however you want to go about it, just make sure that you’re giving your team guidance and courses and teaching them, hey, here’s the skillset of AI, instead of just saying, go use it and you figure out how to do it. So that’s step one. Step two here, we get a bit meta. This is something that I teach in my AI First Business system, is that what you can do is just tell AI what you do all day and then have AI give you an opportunity map that says,

John Jantsch (16:47.01)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (17:03.132)

Hey, here’s where you can use me. Here’s where you can use me at the assistant strategist and advisor level. So what I teach in that AI first business system is essentially recruiting AI to tell you where to hire AI. And then again, now you have task by task. You can say, okay, you know what? I hate doing this one task every day. Let me prioritize situating that and having AI support with that. Or being able to say AI is helping at the assistant and strategist level of this one task.

John Jantsch (17:03.502)

I like that.

John Jantsch (17:15.746)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (17:31.516)

But if we just made this one little tweak, it could actually now be an advisor as well within that whole task. And now we’re getting so much more information. We’re making better decisions. We’re more prepared, for example. That’s the way that I see it. So leaders making sure that you’re giving your team actual guidance and a plan as to how to use it because they are asking for it. They’re begging you for it, but they don’t want to raise their hand and say it. And then two, create that opportunity map.

John Jantsch (17:54.254)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (17:59.344)

Go through and tell AI what you do every day and have AI tell you where it can help.

John Jantsch (18:05.184)

So you use the term using AI for recruiting. I may have messed that up. You may have done it the other way around. explain kind of what, I know what you mean by that, but I think you kind of went by it. So I want you to kind of specifically highlight that idea.

Eva Gutierrez (18:20.464)

Yeah, so, and this kind of puts me out of a job hilariously when I give this advice, right? Because I help people figure out where to add AI to their work, but at the end of the day, the best thing I can do is actually teach you the skillset of AI, which is this hybrid intelligent relationship where you’re going to rely on AI to help you move forward with AI. So you can go into ChatGPT and say, hey, here’s everything that I do every day.

John Jantsch (18:26.062)

You

John Jantsch (18:45.133)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (18:45.836)

Here’s where I use AI support. Here’s where I don’t use AI support. Here are the tools that I’m using. Here are the tools that I kind of want to use, but I’m not using. And what it can do is create this opportunity map for you. I have a full workflow of this whole thing, but you can duct tape it together, of course, and be able to have AI just say, here’s all the tasks that you do every day. Here’s how AI could help at the assistant level. Here’s how it can help at the strategist level. Here’s how it can help at the advisor level.

John Jantsch (18:59.074)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (19:12.122)

And so what you’ve really done is just upgrade AI into your recruiter, right? Because you haven’t hired AI to do any of those things yet. You’ve just essentially told AI, can you come audit my business and then tell me who I should hire and where it would be the most helpful? But instead of being like, well, you need a full-time salary role here, you need this over here, we get to do it a little bit differently in this case and just go task by task.

John Jantsch (19:38.006)

And I think what you just shared right there is really the biggest mindset shift, you know, because I do think a lot of people look at a chat GPT window and say, I need to tell it what to do. You know, I need to tell it to give me this output. And I think a lot of times they really struggle because they don’t know what they don’t know. And so I think just this idea of asking it first is such a mindset shift.

Eva Gutierrez (19:43.078)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (20:03.986)

Exactly. And that’s really all AI is if you start to think about it, right? It’s a mindset shift to say, okay, I just need to start to bring this on task by task. It’s a mind shift to say, you know what I’m going to do here? I’m going to give it as much context and maybe more context than I normally give someone that I hire for the role. It’s all of these reframes that are the reason that it’s like a hybrid intelligent thing.

John Jantsch (20:09.102)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (20:31.829)

This is a relationship we’re building where we’re learning who AI needs us to be in order for AI to be exactly what we want it to be. And the thing about AI, and I talk about this all the time, say AI is like a golden retriever. It’s ready to go whenever you’re ready to go. It’s like, where are we going? To the kitchen? Awesome, I couldn’t be more excited. Are we going on a walk? I cannot wait. You just tell me where you want to go, because let’s go over there. I don’t even care. And it’s our job to put the constraints on it.

and to say, is awesome, I love having intelligence on demand, but my role as the human part of this hybrid intelligence is to constantly put the guardrails on intelligence on demand and force it to funnel this intelligence through the specific guardrails that I need for this specific task or this thing I wanna think through or a workflow that I’m building out. So it’s our job in order to do that. And that is like the macro reframe that we all need.

John Jantsch (21:28.046)

Yeah, and it’s my hope, we never know, but it’s my hope that that’s the 5 % we need to guard, right? And own as humans because that’ll become our job. Well, Ava, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d invite people to connect with you and learn about your work?

Eva Gutierrez (21:33.947)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (21:45.605)

Yeah, you can go to thinkwithai.com and that’s where I have that AI first business system as well as I’m building out some really cool stuff with Notion agents right now that I am so stoked about. So you can check everything out over there.

John Jantsch (21:55.726)

Awesome again. Well, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Eva Gutierrez (22:04.242)

Likewise, John. Nice to meet you.

John Jantsch (00:00.898)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Don Yeager. He’s a New York Times bestselling author, leadership expert, and sought after speaker with deep experience interviewing world-class athletes, coaches, and business leaders. Don has distilled the secrets of high performance into a practical framework. His latest book, the new

Science of Momentum challenges conventional wisdom and offers a research-backed playbook for leaders who want to sustained success. So, Don, welcome to the show. Should we see how many sports cliches we can use in this interview?

Don Yaeger (00:36.413)

Hey John, thank you so much, looking forward to it.

I don’t know. I feel like I’m already in the bottom of the ninth. mean, you know, because anyway, good.

John Jantsch (00:47.31)

So, just take it one question at a time. That’s all you could do, So, speaking of cliches, you argue that momentum isn’t just a cliche, it’s a science. What made you tackle this topic?

Don Yaeger (01:06.493)

So like many of your listeners probably, I was watching the Super Bowl a few years ago when the New England Patriots fell behind to the Atlanta Falcons 28 to 3. And the prognosticator said Atlanta had a 99.4 % chance of winning the game at that stage. Most of America turned the game off because it was over. And then suddenly, Tom Brady.

John Jantsch (01:24.483)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (01:31.707)

runs 12 yards on third and eight. Tom Brady had him run 12 yards all season long, right? That’s not who he is. And one little thing after another started stacking up and pretty soon, as we all know, New England created the greatest comeback in the history of the Super Bowl. And I watched and at the end of the game, Joe Buck said this great line. said, New England has rewritten the word, redefined the word momentum tonight.

So the next morning I came in, opened up the whiteboard in my office, brought in the creative team that works for me, and just wrote the words, how do you turn a moment into momentum? Can momentum be manufactured? Can we engineer it? Can we build it? Or is it we just have to wait on something good to happen? And that started an eight-year project interviewing the best leaders in the world in the worlds of sports, politics, the military, and business to try to understand.

John Jantsch (02:13.027)

No.

Don Yaeger (02:29.828)

How do they construct momentum?

John Jantsch (02:32.716)

Yeah, let’s talk little bit about that. Cause I think most people probably think in terms of like momentum, something you just get caught up in, you know, it takes you, it carries you. Right. And you, you argue it’s really, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, but again, was going to say, since your argument can be engineered, there like triggers or things that you found that start, you know, that, that process.

Don Yaeger (02:38.491)

Right. Right. And that can be true, but that can be true, by the way. Yeah. But the great ones don’t wait on it.

Don Yaeger (02:54.247)

There are actually, a big piece of it is, in fact, in the book, we actually built a model for how momentum can be constructed in your organization. And what’s interesting is I used to think it always began with a spark, something that happened, right? What I grew to understand from talking to these great leaders is that there’s an entire framework of effort that is created before the spark. in that framework,

The first thing you have to do is create the right culture a culture where we where we actually aren’t pitting each other pitting teammates against each other which happens too often then you got to recruit people who are both talented but can cheer for other talented people right and that’s very hard to do as well and Then the third thing is there’s there’s actually an entire model of preparation That that allows you to be mentally in the game when the spark occurs which allows you to capture sparks

John Jantsch (03:49.549)

Thanks

Don Yaeger (03:50.695)

that others miss. And we use great examples from great leaders in all three of those kind of pre-spark elements that teach you that you can actually then engineer the moment. And then as the moment comes, it could be small, but you can treat it as if it’s large. if you do so, you can actually, as we said, you can create momentum where other people might be sitting back

and wondering when’s my spark gonna happen?

John Jantsch (04:23.606)

Yeah, it’s interesting. know, I think a lot of times, you know, people are like, you were just in the right place at the right time. And there is a lot of truth to that, but it’s also recognizing the right place, right? And taking action, isn’t it?

Don Yaeger (04:35.699)

Yeah. In fact, so, um, one of our great interviews, one of my favorite interviews in the entire book, did 250 interviews with great leaders was with a basketball coach named Buzz Williams. Buzz was the coach at Texas A &M last few years. He’s now the coach at Maryland, but, uh, but Buzz all season long off season, all off season long, uh, you’re walking by his office or one of his players. He’ll say, John, get in here. And he’ll pop open the laptop and on his laptop, he’ll have.

a contest, a competitive contest that’s being played and it’s often not in basketball, right? It could be women’s volleyball, could be softball, baseball, football. And what he wants is for the player to sit down, he opens up the laptop, hits play, and then he lets them watch six to seven minutes of the contest. Then he closes the laptop and he said, tell me exactly what is the time left in the game right now?

What’s the score in this very moment that I just closed the laptop and who has momentum on their side? And explain to me why you believe that. And what he wants is he wants to build within his players this awareness of what’s happening around them so that as something good happens, they are better in position to grab onto it, do something with it.

John Jantsch (05:50.594)

Yes.

Don Yaeger (06:01.107)

You know, the business analogy of that would be, you know, those organizations, and there are plenty of them that are very good, that create what if teams, right? A team of executives who sit in on a regular basis are asking themselves, what if? I mean, let’s, let’s throw something crazy out there. What if the president United States decides to throw tariffs on every country in the world and half of our supply chain is gone? What if, what, what, would never happen.

John Jantsch (06:27.598)

that would never happen. Why are we even talking about that?

Don Yaeger (06:31.485)

But if it were to happen, what would we do? Right? What if the CEO of our greatest competitor is suddenly caught on a big screen at a Coldplay concert, hugging up on his HR director? What if? I mean, that would never happen, right? Nobody would ever do that. But the truth is, if you can start thinking about what if concepts, what it does, forget whether those are the exact same things that happened.

The concept is that we collectively are constantly thinking about the world as our playing field. And when you’re thinking about the world as your playing field, you have a greater opportunity to capture those moments when they come.

John Jantsch (07:17.176)

So we’ve been talking about catching momentum and engineering momentum. What are some ways that you found that people actually, probably not intentionally, but actually kill momentum?

Don Yaeger (07:29.113)

well, one of the easiest ways to kill momentum is to not recognize it when it happens. Right? So something comes along an opportunity, a, and you sit and you’re busy chuckling because you’re thinking, how crazy is that? And instead of, capturing and using the moment to your advantage, you’re, you’re laughing about it. And pretty soon the moment’s gone. Right? They’re called sparks for a reason. you know, they don’t last.

John Jantsch (07:34.286)

Sure. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:50.22)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (07:55.707)

unless you’ve built the kindling, which is all the work you do in advance, and you fan the flames, which is what you do after the spark takes hold. so this idea that it’s, you, but the other ways you can kill momentum are simply in having a bad, let’s say you recruit people and that are so eye centered that if I’m not the reason that good things are happening, then I don’t want to be proud. I’m not happy.

You know, the way you discover this is the next time you as a group are celebrating someone on your team that just did something fantastic. They made a massive sale. They closed the deal. They dislodged the competitor. Look for the A players on your team. Where are they in that celebration? Are they at the front high-fiving the guy, the woman that makes this deal? Or are they in the back grousing, damn it, that should have been my deal.

John Jantsch (08:25.944)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (08:55.345)

Right? Should have been my opportunity. And you start to realize what you have. If you don’t have people who can celebrate each other, you know, in the world of neuroscience, there’s a whole, whole, you know, discussion around what are called mirror neurons, which is what, which is how, you know, we’ve, we’ve all seen somebody walks into a room and yawns. Other people suddenly start yawning, right? Mirror neurons are, we mimic a situation.

John Jantsch (09:19.825)

He

Don Yaeger (09:24.367)

if we feel like we’re connected to it. Well, if I feel like your success is to my detriment, then the mirror neurons in the room are actually quite negative, right? And people pick up on that. And suddenly the vibe changes and that’s a way to kill momentum, by the way.

John Jantsch (09:39.246)

Mm.

John Jantsch (09:46.126)

Were there any examples of people that you’ve spoken with over the years? Sometimes you have to make a change that is really hard because you sense, the market’s going this way. I remember talking to some folks in advertising in newspapers. In the early days of the eight, yeah. In the early days, but.

Don Yaeger (10:04.432)

Wait, newspapers? Wait, I know, my kids still laugh at me that I still grab the New York Times when I’m going through an airport.

John Jantsch (10:13.474)

You know, they were laughing in the early days of, of, you know, the web and just like this Craigslist thing’s a joke. and you know, it pretty much because they, you know, they wouldn’t make the move early to say, we got to kill classified ads and make them free because, you know, they’re going to eat our lunch if we don’t. and, so sometimes, you know, grabbing that momentum or that opportunity that’s obvious means you’re going to.

Don Yaeger (10:31.677)

Right.

John Jantsch (10:39.512)

killed the golden goose, you know? how do you, did you talk to anybody that really, you know, saw momentum as a real negative to begin with, but as where the market was inevitably headed?

Don Yaeger (10:51.473)

Well, yeah, momentum. mean, if you’re momentum is when you had the wind to your back, right? That’s what momentum is. If you want positive momentum. So if you shift, if you fence, if you feel the wind is coming to your, to your, to your front, then you, you might need to turn and make a change. mean, there are a couple of companies that we, that we focused on who built momentum after pretty significant layoffs of employees. Like they had to make the hard choices, but in order to get right,

John Jantsch (10:56.386)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (11:17.837)

Yeah, yeah.

Don Yaeger (11:21.309)

for the market in order to get right to be able to capture the next opportunity in the market. They couldn’t be, they couldn’t have the, so yes, uncomfortable as that was, it was the choice that helped them be ready for an upcoming opportunity to expand that opportunity and take it and create that wind to their back.

John Jantsch (11:45.39)

How do you measure momentum? mean, some cases, there’s certainly very tangible results like revenues up, things like that. But I suspect that some of it’s sort of incremental. Are there metrics that you can say, this means we have momentum?

Don Yaeger (12:03.217)

No, because momentum at its core is a state of mind, right? It’s a belief system at its core. That’s what momentum really is. There’s a scientific version of momentum, right? Which you would when you see, you know, a swinging of of a pendulum or whatever. There’s a scientific version of that. But in in real life, momentum at its core is a is a belief system. So

What you, how do you measure belief system by the number of people who are participating in it, right? If you’re the leader and you’re the only one that believes, you don’t really have momentum because you need, as a group, you have to be able to move into moments. You have to, I mean, remember that question I wrote at the beginning, how do you turn a moment into momentum?

And there was a lot of the preparation piece, having the right people on your team. The recruiting piece is one of the few places in the book where we went with a negative as an example. And the story we share was, you may or may not remember when Michael Jordan retired for the first time from the Chicago Bulls. For all those years, Scottie Pippen had been his Robin.

Right? His bat. He was Batman. Scotty was Robin and Scotty Pippen kind of objected to that. He really wanted to be Batman. He believed he was worthy. So suddenly Jordan’s out of the picture and Scotty is Batman. And that first season Scotty is Batman is okay. Good. But when they get to the playoffs, they’re in, they’re in a key game against the New York Knicks. Two seconds left. Phil Jackson calls a timeout. Scotty Pippen’s like,

John Jantsch (13:28.696)

Yes.

John Jantsch (13:33.986)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (13:55.581)

I’m Batman. got, I’m going to take the shot right now to put us over the top. Cause that’s what I’ve been waiting for. Jackson designs a play for Tony Kukoc to take the shot. Scottie Pippen refuses to get off the bench. He’s like, I’m not even going to the game. If you didn’t call the play for me, I’ve waited all these years. Now it’s my turn and you’re going to give the shot to Tony Kukoc and Pippen refused to get off the bench.

No one on his team ever saw him the same way again. In fact, they, they, they, they, to this day, if in the NBA, you commit a very selfish act as a teammate, it’s referred to as pulling a Pippen, right? Because Scotty Pippen was so absorbed with the idea that it had to be his. He, and so, you know, obviously in the NBA, you, you, you, you picked players, you contract with them. So it’s not like you can dump Pippen.

John Jantsch (14:25.837)

Yes.

John Jantsch (14:36.459)

You

Don Yaeger (14:52.199)

But what they saw immediately was that he was not and could not be the leader of that team. so when you’re picking people to put on your team, pick people who can be happy when somebody else does well, as just as they would be happy if they did it as well for themselves.

John Jantsch (15:13.378)

So, you know, the thing about sports is, I mean, there’s a winner and there’s a loser, right? In a game. In business, it’s not quite so clear.

Don Yaeger (15:22.445)

I would argue that you may not, there’s maybe not a scoreboard that is broadcast to the world, but most often internally, we know the scoreboard. I was working with a company last week, a massive international company and they can look at most many of their products that they are currently in the marketplace with and where they were once the leader of the pack in that product line.

Many of them they are they are not anymore now to the world. They still look they’re still a pretty they’re a fantastic brand Everybody knows who they are, but internally they know they have lost momentum, right? They have lost That others are taking their space. So there are there are There are scoreboards. They just may not be always as public as we’re used to in sports

John Jantsch (16:15.128)

So you, great deal of your career and your very successful books have been as a biographer. Would that be the right term to use? Yeah, right.

Don Yaeger (16:22.119)

Yeah, yeah, I’m a teammate with Deon Sanders and all kinds of other people to help tell their stories.

John Jantsch (16:28.138)

So for this book, you probably didn’t go live with any CEOs for a couple of months or anything. What’s been your tool to kind of extract these stories from some of the folks?

Don Yaeger (16:38.727)

I think what happened was many people were fascinated by the curiosity. The idea that again, you know, in sports, we, we see momentum. everybody. Yeah. The other team has momentum, right? we have momentum. Exactly. It’s probably it’s, it’s as great. It’s as used a word as there is in broadcast. but in business and in other places, it’s known, but not studied. It’s not been studied.

John Jantsch (16:52.878)

Yeah, broadcasters say it all the time during games, right? Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:07.704)

Yeah, yeah, right.

Don Yaeger (17:08.763)

And so the idea that I was coming at it and that I was coming at it from four verticals, right? was, mean, cause we look at it, how did some of the greatest generals in the planet sit down with us to talk about how you build momentum into your game, into your battle plan, right? How do you win small, how do you create small victories to win momentum? And then business, know, some of the great business leaders and politics.

James Carville, Karl Rove, sat down with us to talk about how do you build momentum into a campaign to win an election? You want to peak at the right time, obviously. And so all of these were just fascinating conversations and people, when people find out who else you’re talking to, most people of significance kind of want to be in. They want to be in that conversation. So, wait, you got, I’d like to talk next, basically.

John Jantsch (17:58.496)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:04.366)

Yeah. So if somebody’s listening to this, a leader’s listening to this and they want to make it a part of their culture, because I think I hear that as much as, as anything, you know, you, got to get as many people to believe, you know, well, that’s, that’s probably the definition of culture. Um, is there a single habit or ritual that you’d tell somebody? Okay. You have to start this, this week.

Don Yaeger (18:26.579)

I think what you have as a habit among those that, again, I’m just the voice of the people that I had the chance to interview, was you speak truth into the conversation every week. If people start thinking that you’re blowing smoke, that you’re spinning the numbers, that you’re creating, like the company I was talking about last week.

If the CEO were to walk in and say, guys, we are right on the edge of just kicking the world by the tail. Everybody in the room would know that CEO was not telling the truth. So they were either disconnected from the truth or a liar. And you want to be neither of those things if you’re a leader. And so one of the most important things you have to do every week is speak truth into the situation so that you can then create a vision that others believe is possible.

John Jantsch (19:06.958)

you

Don Yaeger (19:22.161)

And that’s where you begin to create that belief system.

John Jantsch (19:25.802)

And I imagine for a lot of leaders, that’s hard because, you they’re looked up, you’re supposed to have all the answers, you know, you’re you’re like taking us someplace great, right. And so for them to admit, I don’t have all the answers or maybe things aren’t going like we thought, I mean, could be really tough, can’t it? Yeah.

Don Yaeger (19:28.115)

It’s very hard.

Don Yaeger (19:41.423)

It can be, but if you, the alternative is an absolute loser.

John Jantsch (19:48.77)

Yeah. Well, Don, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. Is there someplace you’d invite people to? know you have your own podcast that you’d love people to listen to and then obviously find out about the new science of momentum.

Don Yaeger (19:58.365)

to corporate competitor.

Don Yaeger (20:04.913)

Yeah, you know, just Don Yeager.com and donyeager.com is the best place. because I know a lot of people misspell my last name, I own all iterations of my last name on the internet. And so, yeah, I welcome your listeners to the conversation.

John Jantsch (20:18.35)

Good for you.

John Jantsch (20:27.086)

Awesome. Well, again, appreciate you stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you again one of these days soon out there on the road.

Don Yaeger (20:32.765)

Good job, thank you.

John Jantsch (00:00.898)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Don Yeager. He’s a New York Times bestselling author, leadership expert, and sought after speaker with deep experience interviewing world-class athletes, coaches, and business leaders. Don has distilled the secrets of high performance into a practical framework. His latest book, the new

Science of Momentum challenges conventional wisdom and offers a research-backed playbook for leaders who want to sustained success. So, Don, welcome to the show. Should we see how many sports cliches we can use in this interview?

Don Yaeger (00:36.413)

Hey John, thank you so much, looking forward to it.

I don’t know. I feel like I’m already in the bottom of the ninth. mean, you know, because anyway, good.

John Jantsch (00:47.31)

So, just take it one question at a time. That’s all you could do, So, speaking of cliches, you argue that momentum isn’t just a cliche, it’s a science. What made you tackle this topic?

Don Yaeger (01:06.493)

So like many of your listeners probably, I was watching the Super Bowl a few years ago when the New England Patriots fell behind to the Atlanta Falcons 28 to 3. And the prognosticator said Atlanta had a 99.4 % chance of winning the game at that stage. Most of America turned the game off because it was over. And then suddenly, Tom Brady.

John Jantsch (01:24.483)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (01:31.707)

runs 12 yards on third and eight. Tom Brady had him run 12 yards all season long, right? That’s not who he is. And one little thing after another started stacking up and pretty soon, as we all know, New England created the greatest comeback in the history of the Super Bowl. And I watched and at the end of the game, Joe Buck said this great line. said, New England has rewritten the word, redefined the word momentum tonight.

So the next morning I came in, opened up the whiteboard in my office, brought in the creative team that works for me, and just wrote the words, how do you turn a moment into momentum? Can momentum be manufactured? Can we engineer it? Can we build it? Or is it we just have to wait on something good to happen? And that started an eight-year project interviewing the best leaders in the world in the worlds of sports, politics, the military, and business to try to understand.

John Jantsch (02:13.027)

No.

Don Yaeger (02:29.828)

How do they construct momentum?

John Jantsch (02:32.716)

Yeah, let’s talk little bit about that. Cause I think most people probably think in terms of like momentum, something you just get caught up in, you know, it takes you, it carries you. Right. And you, you argue it’s really, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, but again, was going to say, since your argument can be engineered, there like triggers or things that you found that start, you know, that, that process.

Don Yaeger (02:38.491)

Right. Right. And that can be true, but that can be true, by the way. Yeah. But the great ones don’t wait on it.

Don Yaeger (02:54.247)

There are actually, a big piece of it is, in fact, in the book, we actually built a model for how momentum can be constructed in your organization. And what’s interesting is I used to think it always began with a spark, something that happened, right? What I grew to understand from talking to these great leaders is that there’s an entire framework of effort that is created before the spark. in that framework,

The first thing you have to do is create the right culture a culture where we where we actually aren’t pitting each other pitting teammates against each other which happens too often then you got to recruit people who are both talented but can cheer for other talented people right and that’s very hard to do as well and Then the third thing is there’s there’s actually an entire model of preparation That that allows you to be mentally in the game when the spark occurs which allows you to capture sparks

John Jantsch (03:49.549)

Thanks

Don Yaeger (03:50.695)

that others miss. And we use great examples from great leaders in all three of those kind of pre-spark elements that teach you that you can actually then engineer the moment. And then as the moment comes, it could be small, but you can treat it as if it’s large. if you do so, you can actually, as we said, you can create momentum where other people might be sitting back

and wondering when’s my spark gonna happen?

John Jantsch (04:23.606)

Yeah, it’s interesting. know, I think a lot of times, you know, people are like, you were just in the right place at the right time. And there is a lot of truth to that, but it’s also recognizing the right place, right? And taking action, isn’t it?

Don Yaeger (04:35.699)

Yeah. In fact, so, um, one of our great interviews, one of my favorite interviews in the entire book, did 250 interviews with great leaders was with a basketball coach named Buzz Williams. Buzz was the coach at Texas A &M last few years. He’s now the coach at Maryland, but, uh, but Buzz all season long off season, all off season long, uh, you’re walking by his office or one of his players. He’ll say, John, get in here. And he’ll pop open the laptop and on his laptop, he’ll have.

a contest, a competitive contest that’s being played and it’s often not in basketball, right? It could be women’s volleyball, could be softball, baseball, football. And what he wants is for the player to sit down, he opens up the laptop, hits play, and then he lets them watch six to seven minutes of the contest. Then he closes the laptop and he said, tell me exactly what is the time left in the game right now?

What’s the score in this very moment that I just closed the laptop and who has momentum on their side? And explain to me why you believe that. And what he wants is he wants to build within his players this awareness of what’s happening around them so that as something good happens, they are better in position to grab onto it, do something with it.

John Jantsch (05:50.594)

Yes.

Don Yaeger (06:01.107)

You know, the business analogy of that would be, you know, those organizations, and there are plenty of them that are very good, that create what if teams, right? A team of executives who sit in on a regular basis are asking themselves, what if? I mean, let’s, let’s throw something crazy out there. What if the president United States decides to throw tariffs on every country in the world and half of our supply chain is gone? What if, what, what, would never happen.

John Jantsch (06:27.598)

that would never happen. Why are we even talking about that?

Don Yaeger (06:31.485)

But if it were to happen, what would we do? Right? What if the CEO of our greatest competitor is suddenly caught on a big screen at a Coldplay concert, hugging up on his HR director? What if? I mean, that would never happen, right? Nobody would ever do that. But the truth is, if you can start thinking about what if concepts, what it does, forget whether those are the exact same things that happened.

The concept is that we collectively are constantly thinking about the world as our playing field. And when you’re thinking about the world as your playing field, you have a greater opportunity to capture those moments when they come.

John Jantsch (07:17.176)

So we’ve been talking about catching momentum and engineering momentum. What are some ways that you found that people actually, probably not intentionally, but actually kill momentum?

Don Yaeger (07:29.113)

well, one of the easiest ways to kill momentum is to not recognize it when it happens. Right? So something comes along an opportunity, a, and you sit and you’re busy chuckling because you’re thinking, how crazy is that? And instead of, capturing and using the moment to your advantage, you’re, you’re laughing about it. And pretty soon the moment’s gone. Right? They’re called sparks for a reason. you know, they don’t last.

John Jantsch (07:34.286)

Sure. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:50.22)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (07:55.707)

unless you’ve built the kindling, which is all the work you do in advance, and you fan the flames, which is what you do after the spark takes hold. so this idea that it’s, you, but the other ways you can kill momentum are simply in having a bad, let’s say you recruit people and that are so eye centered that if I’m not the reason that good things are happening, then I don’t want to be proud. I’m not happy.

You know, the way you discover this is the next time you as a group are celebrating someone on your team that just did something fantastic. They made a massive sale. They closed the deal. They dislodged the competitor. Look for the A players on your team. Where are they in that celebration? Are they at the front high-fiving the guy, the woman that makes this deal? Or are they in the back grousing, damn it, that should have been my deal.

John Jantsch (08:25.944)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (08:55.345)

Right? Should have been my opportunity. And you start to realize what you have. If you don’t have people who can celebrate each other, you know, in the world of neuroscience, there’s a whole, whole, you know, discussion around what are called mirror neurons, which is what, which is how, you know, we’ve, we’ve all seen somebody walks into a room and yawns. Other people suddenly start yawning, right? Mirror neurons are, we mimic a situation.

John Jantsch (09:19.825)

He

Don Yaeger (09:24.367)

if we feel like we’re connected to it. Well, if I feel like your success is to my detriment, then the mirror neurons in the room are actually quite negative, right? And people pick up on that. And suddenly the vibe changes and that’s a way to kill momentum, by the way.

John Jantsch (09:39.246)

Mm.

John Jantsch (09:46.126)

Were there any examples of people that you’ve spoken with over the years? Sometimes you have to make a change that is really hard because you sense, the market’s going this way. I remember talking to some folks in advertising in newspapers. In the early days of the eight, yeah. In the early days, but.

Don Yaeger (10:04.432)

Wait, newspapers? Wait, I know, my kids still laugh at me that I still grab the New York Times when I’m going through an airport.

John Jantsch (10:13.474)

You know, they were laughing in the early days of, of, you know, the web and just like this Craigslist thing’s a joke. and you know, it pretty much because they, you know, they wouldn’t make the move early to say, we got to kill classified ads and make them free because, you know, they’re going to eat our lunch if we don’t. and, so sometimes, you know, grabbing that momentum or that opportunity that’s obvious means you’re going to.

Don Yaeger (10:31.677)

Right.

John Jantsch (10:39.512)

killed the golden goose, you know? how do you, did you talk to anybody that really, you know, saw momentum as a real negative to begin with, but as where the market was inevitably headed?

Don Yaeger (10:51.473)

Well, yeah, momentum. mean, if you’re momentum is when you had the wind to your back, right? That’s what momentum is. If you want positive momentum. So if you shift, if you fence, if you feel the wind is coming to your, to your, to your front, then you, you might need to turn and make a change. mean, there are a couple of companies that we, that we focused on who built momentum after pretty significant layoffs of employees. Like they had to make the hard choices, but in order to get right,

John Jantsch (10:56.386)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (11:17.837)

Yeah, yeah.

Don Yaeger (11:21.309)

for the market in order to get right to be able to capture the next opportunity in the market. They couldn’t be, they couldn’t have the, so yes, uncomfortable as that was, it was the choice that helped them be ready for an upcoming opportunity to expand that opportunity and take it and create that wind to their back.

John Jantsch (11:45.39)

How do you measure momentum? mean, some cases, there’s certainly very tangible results like revenues up, things like that. But I suspect that some of it’s sort of incremental. Are there metrics that you can say, this means we have momentum?

Don Yaeger (12:03.217)

No, because momentum at its core is a state of mind, right? It’s a belief system at its core. That’s what momentum really is. There’s a scientific version of momentum, right? Which you would when you see, you know, a swinging of of a pendulum or whatever. There’s a scientific version of that. But in in real life, momentum at its core is a is a belief system. So

What you, how do you measure belief system by the number of people who are participating in it, right? If you’re the leader and you’re the only one that believes, you don’t really have momentum because you need, as a group, you have to be able to move into moments. You have to, I mean, remember that question I wrote at the beginning, how do you turn a moment into momentum?

And there was a lot of the preparation piece, having the right people on your team. The recruiting piece is one of the few places in the book where we went with a negative as an example. And the story we share was, you may or may not remember when Michael Jordan retired for the first time from the Chicago Bulls. For all those years, Scottie Pippen had been his Robin.

Right? His bat. He was Batman. Scotty was Robin and Scotty Pippen kind of objected to that. He really wanted to be Batman. He believed he was worthy. So suddenly Jordan’s out of the picture and Scotty is Batman. And that first season Scotty is Batman is okay. Good. But when they get to the playoffs, they’re in, they’re in a key game against the New York Knicks. Two seconds left. Phil Jackson calls a timeout. Scotty Pippen’s like,

John Jantsch (13:28.696)

Yes.

John Jantsch (13:33.986)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (13:55.581)

I’m Batman. got, I’m going to take the shot right now to put us over the top. Cause that’s what I’ve been waiting for. Jackson designs a play for Tony Kukoc to take the shot. Scottie Pippen refuses to get off the bench. He’s like, I’m not even going to the game. If you didn’t call the play for me, I’ve waited all these years. Now it’s my turn and you’re going to give the shot to Tony Kukoc and Pippen refused to get off the bench.

No one on his team ever saw him the same way again. In fact, they, they, they, they, to this day, if in the NBA, you commit a very selfish act as a teammate, it’s referred to as pulling a Pippen, right? Because Scotty Pippen was so absorbed with the idea that it had to be his. He, and so, you know, obviously in the NBA, you, you, you, you picked players, you contract with them. So it’s not like you can dump Pippen.

John Jantsch (14:25.837)

Yes.

John Jantsch (14:36.459)

You

Don Yaeger (14:52.199)

But what they saw immediately was that he was not and could not be the leader of that team. so when you’re picking people to put on your team, pick people who can be happy when somebody else does well, as just as they would be happy if they did it as well for themselves.

John Jantsch (15:13.378)

So, you know, the thing about sports is, I mean, there’s a winner and there’s a loser, right? In a game. In business, it’s not quite so clear.

Don Yaeger (15:22.445)

I would argue that you may not, there’s maybe not a scoreboard that is broadcast to the world, but most often internally, we know the scoreboard. I was working with a company last week, a massive international company and they can look at most many of their products that they are currently in the marketplace with and where they were once the leader of the pack in that product line.

Many of them they are they are not anymore now to the world. They still look they’re still a pretty they’re a fantastic brand Everybody knows who they are, but internally they know they have lost momentum, right? They have lost That others are taking their space. So there are there are There are scoreboards. They just may not be always as public as we’re used to in sports

John Jantsch (16:15.128)

So you, great deal of your career and your very successful books have been as a biographer. Would that be the right term to use? Yeah, right.

Don Yaeger (16:22.119)

Yeah, yeah, I’m a teammate with Deon Sanders and all kinds of other people to help tell their stories.

John Jantsch (16:28.138)

So for this book, you probably didn’t go live with any CEOs for a couple of months or anything. What’s been your tool to kind of extract these stories from some of the folks?

Don Yaeger (16:38.727)

I think what happened was many people were fascinated by the curiosity. The idea that again, you know, in sports, we, we see momentum. everybody. Yeah. The other team has momentum, right? we have momentum. Exactly. It’s probably it’s, it’s as great. It’s as used a word as there is in broadcast. but in business and in other places, it’s known, but not studied. It’s not been studied.

John Jantsch (16:52.878)

Yeah, broadcasters say it all the time during games, right? Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:07.704)

Yeah, yeah, right.

Don Yaeger (17:08.763)

And so the idea that I was coming at it and that I was coming at it from four verticals, right? was, mean, cause we look at it, how did some of the greatest generals in the planet sit down with us to talk about how you build momentum into your game, into your battle plan, right? How do you win small, how do you create small victories to win momentum? And then business, know, some of the great business leaders and politics.

James Carville, Karl Rove, sat down with us to talk about how do you build momentum into a campaign to win an election? You want to peak at the right time, obviously. And so all of these were just fascinating conversations and people, when people find out who else you’re talking to, most people of significance kind of want to be in. They want to be in that conversation. So, wait, you got, I’d like to talk next, basically.

John Jantsch (17:58.496)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:04.366)

Yeah. So if somebody’s listening to this, a leader’s listening to this and they want to make it a part of their culture, because I think I hear that as much as, as anything, you know, you, got to get as many people to believe, you know, well, that’s, that’s probably the definition of culture. Um, is there a single habit or ritual that you’d tell somebody? Okay. You have to start this, this week.

Don Yaeger (18:26.579)

I think what you have as a habit among those that, again, I’m just the voice of the people that I had the chance to interview, was you speak truth into the conversation every week. If people start thinking that you’re blowing smoke, that you’re spinning the numbers, that you’re creating, like the company I was talking about last week.

If the CEO were to walk in and say, guys, we are right on the edge of just kicking the world by the tail. Everybody in the room would know that CEO was not telling the truth. So they were either disconnected from the truth or a liar. And you want to be neither of those things if you’re a leader. And so one of the most important things you have to do every week is speak truth into the situation so that you can then create a vision that others believe is possible.

John Jantsch (19:06.958)

you

Don Yaeger (19:22.161)

And that’s where you begin to create that belief system.

John Jantsch (19:25.802)

And I imagine for a lot of leaders, that’s hard because, you they’re looked up, you’re supposed to have all the answers, you know, you’re you’re like taking us someplace great, right. And so for them to admit, I don’t have all the answers or maybe things aren’t going like we thought, I mean, could be really tough, can’t it? Yeah.

Don Yaeger (19:28.115)

It’s very hard.

Don Yaeger (19:41.423)

It can be, but if you, the alternative is an absolute loser.

John Jantsch (19:48.77)

Yeah. Well, Don, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. Is there someplace you’d invite people to? know you have your own podcast that you’d love people to listen to and then obviously find out about the new science of momentum.

Don Yaeger (19:58.365)

to corporate competitor.

Don Yaeger (20:04.913)

Yeah, you know, just Don Yeager.com and donyeager.com is the best place. because I know a lot of people misspell my last name, I own all iterations of my last name on the internet. And so, yeah, I welcome your listeners to the conversation.

John Jantsch (20:18.35)

Good for you.

John Jantsch (20:27.086)

Awesome. Well, again, appreciate you stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you again one of these days soon out there on the road.

Don Yaeger (20:32.765)

Good job, thank you.

John Jantsch (00:01.154)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guest today. I’m going to do a solo show. I’m to do, in fact, a couple of shows on the whole broad topic of SEO, which depending upon who you talk to today is either dead or has at least a new name. And so I’m going to add to that conversation. SEO is definitely not dead. However, I’m going to add to that conversation that I think we need to think about it differently. It is more about

visibility. That’s what we’re really trying to get our clients not so much rankings. It’s visibility in a lot of the different ways that people are choosing to find their answers. Obviously people are going to AI tools, Google and other search engines are showing them AI answers. So there’s no question that that is become a part of the game that we have to pay attention to, but not at the absence of many of the other things. I mean, people still make recommendations. make her

referrals for a lot of businesses. They are definitely going to Google, looking in that map pack and they’re looking at your reviews. So there’s many things that lead to whether or not somebody’s going to go on that journey with you or not. Obviously, one of the steps is about being seen and found, but it’s a lot more, it goes a lot deeper than just that element. So what I want to talk about today is actually doing a visibility audit. I’m going to give you the elements that I think are important and talk a little bit about.

how you might think about them and how you might do them as well. And then we’ll have a checklist in the show notes for this. So if you want to head on over to Duct Tape Marketing, the podcast and find the show, the visibility audit, you will be able to acquire that checklist as well. So let’s get into the steps in there. So the first one is, your brand showing up?

in Google’s AI overview. So pretty simple. Go to Google and search the top service products, questions in Google that are related to your company, your industry, your brand, and see if you get cited in any of those. Now, as we go through these, if you and you do have the checklist, you can assign a score to that. Do a dozen or so searches and one to five. How’d you do?

John Jantsch (02:25.902)

There’s a tool out there that I’ve been playing around with that I’ll tell you about. called Gumshoe.ai. And it will really give you, I think, some, you can run a report and get the very detailed information about where you show up in AI. All right, the next one, and this is of course, hyper, hyper important for local businesses, and that is your local pack presence. So on the maps, when somebody searches and it’s clearly a…

a location based type of search. mean, sometimes people actually put a town in there, but even if they don’t, if they’re looking for something in a town, you Google knows where they are. So do searches around your same thing, your business, your industry, your products and services, your brand. And do you appear in the Google map pack? So, you know, do if you’re happened to be in that town, you can do your service near you. Checklisting star reviews.

you know, optimization, not just of your own, but look at your competitors. What are they doing? All right. Speaking of reviews, volume, freshness, sentiment, all really count. Google doesn’t want to see that you’ve got a hundred reviews one day and then haven’t gotten any for three years. So are your reviews strong and recent enough to inspire trust? Because it’s not just Google. It’s the, know, if you go somewhere and nobody’s reviewed a business for four years, doesn’t that make you a little…

suspicious, right? So go to Google business profile, of course, but also today, you know, I used to kind of be negative on Yelp and I’m still not a huge fan of Yelp. But increasingly, those reviews are being drawn in by AI. So we need to look at all the industry review sites, look at the count rating recency responses. Again, this can apply for your competitors as well.

Media mentions and authority, a big, big part of the game and showing up today is really about authority and most media sites, like it or not, are seen as authority. So if you get quoted in the local paper, if you get quoted in the Wall Street Journal, and they link back to your website, even if they don’t link back to your website, but they mention your business.

John Jantsch (04:44.686)

All the crawlers are now picking that kind of information up and really assigning a lot of authority if the Wall Street Journal talked about you you must know something so Is your business being cited in any credible resources or sources? I should say beyond your own website You can look in Google News You can do podcast searches you can use tools like refs or SM some rush

You know, tools like that to find citations, backlinks, mentions of your brand. And again, right now all we’re doing is auditing. These are the key components. Once you have a sense of, or a sense of dread, or a sense of where you stand, these, then we can start talking about how to fix them. All right. You’ve probably heard people talk about this acronym EAT, E-E-A-T. So it stands for experience.

expertise, authority, and trust. It’s basically proof points, especially on your website. So are you adding experience, expertise, authority, and trust in any of your webpages, any of your blog posts? So do you have author bios? Do we have testimonials? Do we have pricing this transparent? Are there case studies? Is there original research? Schema markup also helps identify what those various elements are.

You know, even if you’ve written content three, four years ago, going back and thinking about, you know, how could we add a case study, an actual example of somebody getting a result that we’re talking about here? How can we get quotes from other from clients or how can we get quotes from other experts that would really validate what it is that we’re talking about? All right. Content fit for AI. So is your content structured for AI?

There is now a somewhat formulaic way to make your content more structured for AI. So things like lists, step-by-step how-tos, answers. You’ve probably heard people talk about answer engine optimization. And a lot of times people are going to AI tools and asking very long detailed filtered questions. So the more you can provide these short structured answers to the types of questions that people are asking in conversation,

John Jantsch (07:09.974)

it’s totally different than ranking for some keyword term. You might show up for a percentage of searches on a very specific term because you’ve answered a very specific answer. So FAQs fit right into that as well. So you can again, go back to your content if you’ve written it before and add a step-by-step how-to, add an overview of what the content is, add a table of contents to the…

Add some questions, even have some of your headlines be questions and then answer the question in there. And then one simple way, let’s say you’re a modeling contractor and you do kitchens, baths and additions. Well, you hopefully have service pages for all three of those elements that demonstrate you do lots of great work in those categories. But why not have FAQs on every single one of those pages? People have questions.

And so it’s very useful content to be answering the specific questions that people have, but it’s also amazing search content. It’s amazing AI content. So make sure you’re doing it. And lastly, what are your calls to action? mean, is it, once somebody finds you, it clear what they should do next? So look at all of your top pages. Are there CTAs to call or to book or to actually buy or to contact you?

give people multiple options to just click on, know, have that phone number up at the very top or have that email or have that evaluation form right there on the above the fold on the homepage so that they don’t have to go looking for it, but also in context of when they’re actually looking at a service, maybe they’re actually down to the part where they’re reading the FAQs, make sure you have CTAs there as well. So.

Those are some things that you might want to audit as a visibility type of approach. Like I said, we’ll have the show in the show notes. We’ll actually have a checklist for this tool as well. So that’s it for today. I’m going to do another show pretty soon. Also on the topics around visibility, the topics around how to create content that that will rank for both the search engines. Again, we’ve got to rank for

John Jantsch (09:28.502)

for algorithms, for search engines, for AI bots, and let’s not forget, for people. So thanks for tuning in today. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

John Jantsch (00:01.154)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guest today. I’m going to do a solo show. I’m to do, in fact, a couple of shows on the whole broad topic of SEO, which depending upon who you talk to today is either dead or has at least a new name. And so I’m going to add to that conversation. SEO is definitely not dead. However, I’m going to add to that conversation that I think we need to think about it differently. It is more about

visibility. That’s what we’re really trying to get our clients not so much rankings. It’s visibility in a lot of the different ways that people are choosing to find their answers. Obviously people are going to AI tools, Google and other search engines are showing them AI answers. So there’s no question that that is become a part of the game that we have to pay attention to, but not at the absence of many of the other things. I mean, people still make recommendations. make her

referrals for a lot of businesses. They are definitely going to Google, looking in that map pack and they’re looking at your reviews. So there’s many things that lead to whether or not somebody’s going to go on that journey with you or not. Obviously, one of the steps is about being seen and found, but it’s a lot more, it goes a lot deeper than just that element. So what I want to talk about today is actually doing a visibility audit. I’m going to give you the elements that I think are important and talk a little bit about.

how you might think about them and how you might do them as well. And then we’ll have a checklist in the show notes for this. So if you want to head on over to Duct Tape Marketing, the podcast and find the show, the visibility audit, you will be able to acquire that checklist as well. So let’s get into the steps in there. So the first one is, your brand showing up?

in Google’s AI overview. So pretty simple. Go to Google and search the top service products, questions in Google that are related to your company, your industry, your brand, and see if you get cited in any of those. Now, as we go through these, if you and you do have the checklist, you can assign a score to that. Do a dozen or so searches and one to five. How’d you do?

John Jantsch (02:25.902)

There’s a tool out there that I’ve been playing around with that I’ll tell you about. called Gumshoe.ai. And it will really give you, I think, some, you can run a report and get the very detailed information about where you show up in AI. All right, the next one, and this is of course, hyper, hyper important for local businesses, and that is your local pack presence. So on the maps, when somebody searches and it’s clearly a…

a location based type of search. mean, sometimes people actually put a town in there, but even if they don’t, if they’re looking for something in a town, you Google knows where they are. So do searches around your same thing, your business, your industry, your products and services, your brand. And do you appear in the Google map pack? So, you know, do if you’re happened to be in that town, you can do your service near you. Checklisting star reviews.

you know, optimization, not just of your own, but look at your competitors. What are they doing? All right. Speaking of reviews, volume, freshness, sentiment, all really count. Google doesn’t want to see that you’ve got a hundred reviews one day and then haven’t gotten any for three years. So are your reviews strong and recent enough to inspire trust? Because it’s not just Google. It’s the, know, if you go somewhere and nobody’s reviewed a business for four years, doesn’t that make you a little…

suspicious, right? So go to Google business profile, of course, but also today, you know, I used to kind of be negative on Yelp and I’m still not a huge fan of Yelp. But increasingly, those reviews are being drawn in by AI. So we need to look at all the industry review sites, look at the count rating recency responses. Again, this can apply for your competitors as well.

Media mentions and authority, a big, big part of the game and showing up today is really about authority and most media sites, like it or not, are seen as authority. So if you get quoted in the local paper, if you get quoted in the Wall Street Journal, and they link back to your website, even if they don’t link back to your website, but they mention your business.

John Jantsch (04:44.686)

All the crawlers are now picking that kind of information up and really assigning a lot of authority if the Wall Street Journal talked about you you must know something so Is your business being cited in any credible resources or sources? I should say beyond your own website You can look in Google News You can do podcast searches you can use tools like refs or SM some rush

You know, tools like that to find citations, backlinks, mentions of your brand. And again, right now all we’re doing is auditing. These are the key components. Once you have a sense of, or a sense of dread, or a sense of where you stand, these, then we can start talking about how to fix them. All right. You’ve probably heard people talk about this acronym EAT, E-E-A-T. So it stands for experience.

expertise, authority, and trust. It’s basically proof points, especially on your website. So are you adding experience, expertise, authority, and trust in any of your webpages, any of your blog posts? So do you have author bios? Do we have testimonials? Do we have pricing this transparent? Are there case studies? Is there original research? Schema markup also helps identify what those various elements are.

You know, even if you’ve written content three, four years ago, going back and thinking about, you know, how could we add a case study, an actual example of somebody getting a result that we’re talking about here? How can we get quotes from other from clients or how can we get quotes from other experts that would really validate what it is that we’re talking about? All right. Content fit for AI. So is your content structured for AI?

There is now a somewhat formulaic way to make your content more structured for AI. So things like lists, step-by-step how-tos, answers. You’ve probably heard people talk about answer engine optimization. And a lot of times people are going to AI tools and asking very long detailed filtered questions. So the more you can provide these short structured answers to the types of questions that people are asking in conversation,

John Jantsch (07:09.974)

it’s totally different than ranking for some keyword term. You might show up for a percentage of searches on a very specific term because you’ve answered a very specific answer. So FAQs fit right into that as well. So you can again, go back to your content if you’ve written it before and add a step-by-step how-to, add an overview of what the content is, add a table of contents to the…

Add some questions, even have some of your headlines be questions and then answer the question in there. And then one simple way, let’s say you’re a modeling contractor and you do kitchens, baths and additions. Well, you hopefully have service pages for all three of those elements that demonstrate you do lots of great work in those categories. But why not have FAQs on every single one of those pages? People have questions.

And so it’s very useful content to be answering the specific questions that people have, but it’s also amazing search content. It’s amazing AI content. So make sure you’re doing it. And lastly, what are your calls to action? mean, is it, once somebody finds you, it clear what they should do next? So look at all of your top pages. Are there CTAs to call or to book or to actually buy or to contact you?

give people multiple options to just click on, know, have that phone number up at the very top or have that email or have that evaluation form right there on the above the fold on the homepage so that they don’t have to go looking for it, but also in context of when they’re actually looking at a service, maybe they’re actually down to the part where they’re reading the FAQs, make sure you have CTAs there as well. So.

Those are some things that you might want to audit as a visibility type of approach. Like I said, we’ll have the show in the show notes. We’ll actually have a checklist for this tool as well. So that’s it for today. I’m going to do another show pretty soon. Also on the topics around visibility, the topics around how to create content that that will rank for both the search engines. Again, we’ve got to rank for

John Jantsch (09:28.502)

for algorithms, for search engines, for AI bots, and let’s not forget, for people. So thanks for tuning in today. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

John Jantsch (00:02.52)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Todd Sawicki. He’s the founder and CEO of Gum Shoe AI, an innovative platform at the forefront of AI-driven search and discovery solutions. With a background in digital media marketing technology and leading high-growth startups, Todd is known for his deep insight into changing landscape of search. We’re going to talk about SEO, we’re going to talk about AIO, AEO, all the

Other rows that are out there.

Todd Sawicki (00:33.81)

As long as we don’t call it GEO, what, you can tell the person who came up with that had no background in marketing because I’m sorry, the minute I’ve been in the paid landscape, the minute you see the letters GEO, you instantly think of geo targeting, hello people, the last thing we wanna do is make anything more confusing than it might otherwise be. So, my little soapbox for today.

John Jantsch (00:48.622)

Sure,

John Jantsch (00:54.86)

And so with that, with that Todd’s on the show. So welcome Todd. So let’s, mean, I kind of laid that out a little bit. You know, you’ve created a tool that is really taking advantage of some of the changes that are going on in marketing today, especially around search. So maybe give a high level kind of in your view, let’s start with the basics. All this stuff we’re hearing about.

Todd Sawicki (01:10.609)

Yes.

John Jantsch (01:21.41)

GEO for one, AIO, AIO, know, all those kinds of things. I mean, what does it all really boil down to for the typical marketer or typical business?

Todd Sawicki (01:31.374)

It is a it is a good question. So I think we all woke up a year ago. And with the rise of zero click searches with AI mode in Google search taking off, and we began to see Google traffic starting to decline. And at the same time, if anyone was sort of looking at their, like GA four analytics or whatever they’re using, they started to see, look, I’m getting this new basket of traffic from chat, tbt and others. And so AI

John Jantsch (01:50.478)

Mm-hmm.

Todd Sawicki (01:58.706)

and sort of looking at that. so the AI search is taking off. And so as a marketer, suddenly you had to start paying to this attention, this new thing called AI search. And so fundamentally, we look at it as, you know, marketers want to understand what the hell are LMS saying about me. And then from a product standpoint, we like to say yes, we help marketers understand what LMS think about them and their brands, and ultimately what to do about it. And I think that’s one of the interesting things is there’s a lot more you can do about it, because AI search is a

fundamentally different platform and approach than traditional search and really in many ways I think a search is solving a lot of the problems we’ve been complaints as end users we’ve had about traditional search and then there’s downstream applications for marketers and how to think about how you work with those platforms as a result.

John Jantsch (02:45.262)

Well, and I think you’re hitting on one of the things that I try to get people to understand. Everybody always goes, oh, we’ve got these new platforms. Um, but what they fail sometimes to recognize is that the buyer behavior is changing because of these new platforms and how people, what their expectations are, how they now go to, even to Google. mean, I’m seeing people do this. We used to put it in these nice little compact searches. Well, I’m seeing people put in these very long searches now, very high intent, you know, very filtered almost because they know they can get AI overviews and things. And I think that.

Todd Sawicki (02:57.202)

Correct.

Todd Sawicki (03:09.039)

Exactly.

John Jantsch (03:15.222)

change is really what we really need to adjust to, right? It’s not necessarily the technology, is it?

Todd Sawicki (03:21.778)

I agree users have fundamentally changed and you probably hear this even anecdotally amongst your friend sets. Like you start kind of experimenting with chat tpt or perplexity or whatever it is and you’re like you ask it a real deep question that you know is very frustrating to get answered in traditional search and you would have to click through 10 things and it was just a pain in the ass and took a lot of time and where now you get a pretty good answer most of the time right away and it fundamentally changes the experience. I mean we’re seeing dramatic thing changes especially in complex areas like b2b type searches.

It’s a great use case when you’re researching very technical things. You’re researching like more long tail areas for traditional search work wonderfully in the world of AI. And I think the other thing that traditional search really did a poor job of, and it really shows up in AI search is AI search does a phenomenal job of personalizing its answers for you. And that is one of the things that

in even in terms of our own product and platform, but the implications of that are very interesting. And so as an end user rate, would you imagine think of the LM as you walk into a shoe store, and there’s a wall of 500 pairs of shoes behind that salesperson as you walk in, and the LM is the salesperson. And so you’re trying to know what’s the right pair of shoes? Well, Google you do it doesn’t really ever answer I need a new pair of shoes, you would never like Google just would struggle with that. But with

John Jantsch (04:43.488)

Or give you the most popular shoes or whatever.

Todd Sawicki (04:45.488)

Or give you the most popular one. Exactly. Just give you the most popular one. But the LLMs are really trying to understand, are you a runner? Are you a hiker? you have an account, you register, they’re building profiles of you, interestingly enough. Right? The minute you put your email in, it knows where you work. It knows what you’re affiliated with. And so as a result, your users are seeing that there really, there’s a value for that relationship between you and the LLMs. It learns more about who you are. It discovers things. It’s trying to personalize the answers. And so it therefore can give you a better answer and really help you in a way that

Traditional search never quite got to.

John Jantsch (05:18.252)

You know, and one of things that I get business owners pretty excited about, because a lot of them are going, is all hype or like, don’t, you know, do I got to really do this or am I really going to get AI traffic or not get AI traffic? So all these questions and all I do is show them analytics. and I am able to demonstrate that to them, the people who come from AI stay on your site 10 times longer and convert seven times more than your paid ads, more than your organic traffic. And a lot of that, think is just what you talked about because.

Todd Sawicki (05:43.602)

Yup.

John Jantsch (05:47.5)

they are doing the filtering themselves. And if they get to your website, it’s because you had what they wanted. Right.

Todd Sawicki (05:51.258)

Exactly. They’re pre-qualified. Right. No, and we’re seeing stats on the B to C. We typically see a little bit less than seven X, probably more in the range of kind of two to five X increased conversions on the B to B side. We’re seeing increased conversion rates up to like 20 X better. Cause again, they’re down the funnel. Cause right. When I think about, you think of from a marketer standpoint, let’s think about the classic marketing funnel. There’s discovery, then consideration, then conversion.

Google managed discovery and then handed you off to websites to manage consideration like your own website some third-party writer whatever it might be but AI is trying to do not just discovery but manage through the Q &A process consideration as well and then hand that user off for conversion and So that’s why you see these higher conversion rates. They’re further down the funnel AI has managed that now from a marketing standpoint You’re now your challenges. I need to manage AI differently because now suddenly it’s it’s the one selling my product

John Jantsch (06:49.09)

Yeah, yeah.

Todd Sawicki (06:49.35)

And I think that’s the fundamental shift here as a marketer is you have to going back to that, that shoe store analogy, that element as a salesperson means you’re going to have to manage that person, right? That’s not your job. Whereas SEO, and I think this is one of the other big changes. SEO is a very technical thing, like link building. And remember that the just the ridiculous debate we had for years about is it a sub domain or a folder? Right? Is that marketing? No, that’s a very technical thing. And you know, any non technical marketer, whenever that discussion and by the way,

for those who don’t pay attention that went on for years like it was like a red versus blue sort of battle in the online marketing sphere. And but a very technical thing not marketing based at all. And I think the differences for LLMs, it’s much more of a, oh, how do I teach the LLMs what to say about my product, just like I teach, you know, a salesperson at the front of Dick’s Sporting Goods store kind of the same way. And so it’s now it’s much more of a product marketing exercise than it ever was with traditional search. And I think that’s the other thing is

You’re going to have to think about how you talk to the LLMs and how you market to them.

John Jantsch (07:50.35)

Well, and this gets at the crux of, you know, a good salesperson is trained on, know, all the objections of, you know, all the questions they’re going to get. Right. And so now all of a sudden our content has to be answers.

Todd Sawicki (07:57.222)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Todd Sawicki (08:04.722)

Correct? absolutely. So one of the things, so Gumshoo as a platform has been, we publicly launched it about six months ago and we’ve already worked more than 3,500 marketers have signed up. We’ve already generated millions of prompts on behalf of marketers so they understand what elements say in response to these prompts. And as a result, we’re able to analyze those response. think it’s like 10 million answers that we’ve analyzed.

John Jantsch (08:29.112)

Mm-hmm.

Todd Sawicki (08:30.416)

And then you really, you start to see patterns in what they’re doing, but they absolutely want you as marketers to provide them kind of sample question answers back. if you, of the fascinating things about LLMs is they actually link, they prefer the number one source that they link to for product information are brand websites. And then within that, they link to product description pages or PDPs or product detail pages, whatever description you want to use, like the PDPs, FAQs,

John Jantsch (08:50.616)

Mm-hmm.

Todd Sawicki (08:59.896)

knowledge base articles, how to sections, they love that sort of informative how to answer questions for them. And they use that as a guide. Now they process their own way, they kind of regurgitate it in their own way, but they want to use that as a basis. So you’re right, you’re gonna you have to just like you train that salesperson on Rude Q &A, you’re doing the same thing now with the models, which I think is interesting to marketers, when they start kind of like seeing and understanding like it’s not a marketing exercise, and not a weird technical link building sub domain folder esoteric discussion anymore.

John Jantsch (09:04.738)

Yep. Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:25.292)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and one of the things that we have seen, because, know, I’ve always believed that, that you do content, right. You’re going to get rewarded by the search engines. Well, we’ve been doing content, right. In my view, you know, hub pages, structured content, FAQs, table of contents, summaries, schema, you know, we’ve been doing all that stuff because it was good content marketing. well,

Todd Sawicki (09:37.244)

Yes.

John Jantsch (09:52.258)

the LLMs and AI are actually rewarding us for that work right now because we ranked high in Google. We are now ranking higher in AI overviews and in chat GPT. Are you seeing that as well?

Todd Sawicki (10:06.354)

So if you don’t have content online, it is hard for AI to even know you exist. And so that’s sort of step one. You’d be surprised at the lack of content out there. It’s, know, all right, well, you sell it. You sell these programs. But I think it’s because everyone probably thinks they’ve all, everyone’s done content marketing. It’s not always the case.

John Jantsch (10:12.526)

Well, yeah.

Well, no, no, I would not be surprised.

Yeah. Yeah. I always love it. I always love it when we go to work with a new client and they say, yeah, well, our SEO firm is doing this for us. And it’s like, what are they SEOing? Like, there’s no content there.

Todd Sawicki (10:35.83)

There you go. Exactly. There’s no content. There’s nothing else. And so the differences here you mentioned, like you generated content that the difference here though is there’s a subtle, you know, benefit and you kind of address this, I’m gonna call it what you said, which is you’re getting rewarded. But what’s interesting is Google, it was rewarding popularity, not necessarily the best content and the most authoritative content. What LMS are doing is doing a much better job of rewarding the correct content. So

It’s sort of like, and we have a good stator on this, is, we look up the traditional Google rank of all the URLs that are cited by AI and its answer, and its justification for its answers. The traditional Google rank is below 21, 50 to 90 % of the time, meaning page three and beyond. So it’s pulling out these, so it is looking at some of those that traditionally link to content SEO, but it was always these deep links. And the problem with traditional searchers,

John Jantsch (11:18.658)

Well, yes.

Todd Sawicki (11:28.602)

is, you know, we kind of generically use the stat one out of 100 people go to page two on Google, one out of 1000 go to page three, one out of 10,000 go to page four, and no one goes to page five. And that’s very exactly how the dead bodies but AI to my stat 59 % of the links they surface are in that that sort of buried into because they have AI or machines, they have infinite patients. So what they’re good at doing is finding authoritatively correct like we like to see canonical information. And then and so as a brand,

John Jantsch (11:38.734)

Yeah, that’s where you hide the dead bodies, right?

John Jantsch (11:51.15)

Yeah.

Todd Sawicki (11:58.416)

all that work that maybe struggled to get surfaced in Google, because it just wasn’t as popular or using out to people buying links. Now, now they’re really to your point, really rewarding good content, good highly valued structured content. And so it’s sort of like, it’s sort of the it’s paying off 10 years of work, finally. And so the people who may be struggled to get some of that popularity in Google, it is absolutely paying off in AI overview, AI search and AI overviews and things like that in a way that you always prayed and hoped for as a content market, like your day has come.

John Jantsch (12:07.842)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:13.964)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:26.35)

Yeah

Todd Sawicki (12:26.716)

Producing great content is a payoff and it’s happening. And I think that’s really fascinating here, which is people are like, with the rise of AI Slop, no, the models want good content and they’re good at deducing what is good content. AI Slop will not get ranked and you have to, they want authoritative information. And so that’s content that will get ranked in AI search and then drive traffic today and tomorrow, agentic purchases, right? You’re ultimately trying to drive some of that conversion more and more that AI will be driving that itself. Like Perplexity’s browser will load a cart for you today.

Right, it’s loading products it’s picking on your behalf into that. So that future is coming fast and furiously. And so I think that change is sort of fascinating to see when you look at what’s happening. Now, the other stat about what’s really fascinating here is, okay, what if I don’t have been produced 10 years of content, am I screwed? Well, one of the other facts that we’ve seen is that the average age of a cited piece of content

is only 86 days old in AI search. And that’s falling 10 to 15 % quarter per quarter. Now there’s a caveat there, which is it doesn’t have to be originally published, it just has to be updated. Like the AI will look at content that’s older, but as long as it’s been updated, and you note that that updated date, it will value that as well. And so and that 86 days is falling 10 to 15 % every quarter. So today it’s 86 days, next quarter is gonna be 78, 70 to the quarter after that, and see you get faster and faster.

So you’re gonna have to be doing a lot more work around content, maintaining it, updating it. It’s not a publish once and walk away model anymore. It’s gonna be a constant refresh. And so, the good side of that is you’re just starting out. We’ve definitely seen this with people where you can impact the results well within a 90 day window where traditional search that was almost impossible. And so there’s a definitely, don’t wait, get started. Hire John and his team.

John Jantsch (14:12.504)

But again, yeah, well, but I was also going to say that another best practice for years has been repurpose your content. And so, I mean, I now it’s like repurpose your content in a specific way, you know, add FAQs, you know, to that content, right? But, but I think that’s what you’re saying is should be very helpful for those people that just kind of wrote the hundred one off blog posts. It’s like, no, now go back and make that pay. Let’s talk specifically.

Todd Sawicki (14:28.146)

Correct. Right.

Todd Sawicki (14:39.94)

Exactly, exactly. It’s fascinating to kind of, you know, watch that all happen and come to fruition.

John Jantsch (14:42.742)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s talk specifically about gumshoe. I know that’s what you want to talk about. But first off, I have an account. I’ve played with it and it is in seemingly incredibly complex what you’ve built. And so my first question is, my first question is, where did that come from? Are you a mad scientist or did you hire people or how did you develop that? Because

Todd Sawicki (15:02.844)

Well, thank you.

Todd Sawicki (15:10.77)

So we have a team, right? We have a team. I’ve been in digital marketing tech for 20 years in my career and got involved in, and really the common theme has been around customer acquisition as it turns out. And I even view the purpose, we only care about AI search as marketers, ultimately because it can drive business, right? It’ll drive traffic and revenue, right? So fundamentally it’s a, and so I 20 years ago got involved in toolbars and search. Then I got into the social marketing landscape, just as that was taking off like 2007 to,

John Jantsch (15:28.334)

That’s right. That’s right.

Todd Sawicki (15:39.986)

to 2012 and then got into paid and built a DSP. So in the programmatic space and then was playing in ecommerce and Shopify’s ecosystem, you building customer acquisition apps in there and then ultimately transition here. And it was sort of the space of a year ago was talking to marketers. And again, the beginning of this conversation around AI search and the rise of that. And if you’re a marketer, and suddenly the channel you’re relying on Google search falls off a cliff. for some key keywords, I heard

30 60, even 90 % declines in traffic, even on the paid side. Like it just Google is sacrificing even paid traffic and on some keywords. So that’s an existential change in the landscape. And then as we started thinking about this in terms of working with marketers, you’re like, well, you know, to what I said earlier, gumshoe helps brands understand what elements think about them. And then what to do about it. Well, that where does that come from? Well, if you’re a marketer, you can’t just log into chat tpt and find out what it’s saying to you because

John Jantsch (16:12.813)

Mm.

Todd Sawicki (16:37.508)

as you I don’t know if any everyone should go watch the season premiere this fall’s episode from Boulder natives, you know, the creators of South Park, the first episode this year, the main one of the main characters dads is like falling in love with chat tbt because all it does is flatter him. And it says like every idea he has is wonderful. And it’s a great and he’s got some he’s trying to start a new business. And his wife gets all pissed off because he’s constantly going to ask chat tbt and says see I’m right, you know,

John Jantsch (16:54.285)

Right.

Todd Sawicki (17:05.426)

his wife’s name is Sharon, see I’m white Sharon, chat TBT says I’m right. And he’s like, No, it just says that to everybody. And so as a marketer, you you can’t just log in and ask chat TBT what it thinks about your business, because it’s going to kind of lie, it’s going to flatter you, it’s going to say the most optimal thing it can because it by the way, the minute you put your email in, it looks you up on LinkedIn, it knows it knows where you work, it knows your products, it’s no it knows how to answer things. And so then you realize as a marketer, I don’t care what LM say to me, I say, I care what it says to my target customers.

John Jantsch (17:17.666)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (17:31.832)

Yeah. Yeah.

Todd Sawicki (17:34.01)

And so the way that we built our product was around how do you help marketers understand what it’s really saying to its customers? And so our point of view as well, how do we get in the shoes of that customer? And so what we do is we build these personas which become synthetic users. right, so those are what are asking prompts in the models. We have a better understanding of how they, how will they talk to, how the models speak to these different, different customers and those insights of like, okay, here’s how it, and by the way, the variety of answers between one type of

persona and another is fascinating. And they’re absolutely customizing their answers. Like, John, you’ve seen this, right? Just one customer will say, like, just imagine you’re a hiker, you’re going to get a different answer for the pair of shoes than if you’re a marathon runner. And so that makes rational sense as a marketer kind of understanding this nuance and how it’s treating different types of end users using AI search is sort of a fascinating insight. And it’s cool just to look at the answers and see what they say to different things. So that’s my point about marketers and the messaging and seeing how it talks to different people.

John Jantsch (18:06.594)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:31.374)

One of my first observations that kind of blew me away frankly was I just put in a company’s URL, I think is all I did. yeah, and it came up with, I want to say eight, maybe it was a little more than that personas. And they were, we had already done that work, but they were very spot on, maybe even a little better descriptions. And what I found was interesting was it actually,

Todd Sawicki (18:39.324)

Correct, that’s what you start with. You start with the URL, correct.

John Jantsch (19:00.342)

All the analytics and search was great, but we actually got some messaging ideas just from that part of it, and that wasn’t even the intent.

Todd Sawicki (19:10.652)

Well, and that’s what I mean about it. you know, it’s, was talking with a head of product marketing earlier today, and I’m like, this is product marketing’s moment, because AI search is fundamentally a product marketing exercise. And it’s a positioning exercise. And when you read those prompts and answers, we hear that all the time, because what we help you on what we ask questions and basically ask questions around product areas for your business. And those will give you a set of responses like, we recommend these three companies or these eight companies or these five. And then you see the rationale for those

recommendations. And that’s great marketing, right at feedback. It’s it’s what’s our positioning, what’s our competitive positioning, you show this to any product market, like, oh, my god, this is like my competitive messaging framework, which you’d by the way, what you describe john a itself serve, can do this yourself, anyone can enter a URL of a company to get this. And in like 10 to 15 minutes, you’re walking away with a really cool understanding of your products position in the marketplace, at least the marketplace of AI search, which is meant to be a broader perspective of the world, obviously.

But it’s no, hear this all the time. It’s fascinating. Like it is a total rabbit hole for anyone who cares about commutative or comparative messaging.

John Jantsch (20:13.742)

Yeah. So the other observation is that, you know, lot of people that are talking about losing search traffic, it’s for, let’s say I’m a remodeling contractor. It’s they’re losing traffic for trends in kitchens, right? Which was not somebody that was going to buy anything, right? They’re losing a lot of that traffic because they’d written a great trend article for 2025, right?

Todd Sawicki (20:37.138)

Correct.

John Jantsch (20:38.37)

But that was not going to ever convert. But what’s interesting from what you’re unearthing is you’re unearthing all these really high intent searches. I mean, the search string is such that it’s like, yeah, that person’s looking to remodel their kitchen. And I think that that’s what marketers need to really focus on is that, forget about the, I mean, we do still have to do a lot of things to create awareness. But what we really need to focus on is high intent right now and capturing that search.

Todd Sawicki (21:07.138)

That is absolutely, I think a change, which is you’re going to go a little bit more down funnel. And you because you I think you can with AI search problem with Google is all those searches were so high level and so generic. It was hard to, to you’re right, the lack of long detailed searches in Google meant it was hard as a market, you couldn’t really target that sort of bottom of funnel activity. But AI is kind of all about that. And even if you ask a generic question, AI will follow it up with a more specific like they want to, they want to know which direction they need to go. There’s a back and forth that never existed in Google search.

John Jantsch (21:16.962)

Yeah, right.

Todd Sawicki (21:35.878)

that absolutely exists in AI. And you anyone who’s experienced this, when you go to the models, it’ll it’ll ask for follow ups, it’ll clarify things, it’ll make sure it understands what you’re talking about. So that it’s its goal is to give you the very best answer possible.

John Jantsch (21:41.932)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (21:48.686)

Yeah, it wouldn’t have been great. You go to Google and say, no, that answer was wrong. Fix it, right?

Todd Sawicki (21:52.324)

Exactly, we all wish we could like that search, you’ll get some results. You’re like, that is a terrible right link. And now with all the like the amount of Google searches that are so link baited to death. I love to get the analogy of in a lot, you know, I said earlier, the AI search is fixing a lot of things wrong with traditional search, like how many times in our lives like you bought like a new TV, and I just need to know the damn matter the width of it. So will it fit on my mantle or not? And you do a search and like you get every link is 10 best this or 10 best that or trends of

hot TVs this Christmas like I just need the dang measurement. Come on, Google.

John Jantsch (22:23.854)

or a link to Amazon that’s not even a TV. Those are my favorite. So I’m sorry, we got geeking out here on like all the under the hood stuff. And I’d love it you could just like give us the two minutes feel what is gumshoe? How you know, how does it work? How does somebody try it out?

Todd Sawicki (22:28.187)

Right!

Todd Sawicki (22:42.556)

So at any market, it’s a publicly available and you can try it out for free. It is, you can generate a report about your company. You go to it, as John said, you’re going to enter your company’s URL. And then from there, what we’re gonna do is again, show you what LMS think about your business and product. You’re gonna select a product that’ll generate personas and then we’ll generate the prompts that represent the activity that users are having with AI. And then…

run a series of real-time conversations, we turn those personas effectively into synthetic users. That’s kind of a buzzy word. Synthetic is the ultimate now AI buzzword. It’s a simulated user, it’s a synthetic user. And then that user will, yeah, exactly. It’s better than that. We’ll have a series of conversations with the LLMs. We kind of create those and then we analyze the chat activity and kind of package that up in a way so that you can help identify areas, topics of these types of prompts where you’re doing well or you’re doing poorly.

John Jantsch (23:14.648)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (23:18.83)

It’s better than bot though, isn’t it?

Todd Sawicki (23:38.736)

And then the next step is we also allow you to sort of then generate the content based upon, you know, where your strengths and weaknesses are that through our platform that you can then host on your site. And the way to think of it is, is your personas are your predicted customers, who the elements think are your top customers, and then they want instructions, the content you generate is intended to be or write on your own, is intended to be the instruction set back to the models. Okay, for these customers, here’s the features and benefits that we believe appeal to them and why they want to pick our products.

And ultimately, that’s going to send traffic back to your site. And then can help analyze that to understand was it good traffic, bad traffic, what have you. And so the goal of our point of view is to say, again, how do we help you understand what I’m thinking about you and then what to do about it, right? You’re ultimately how do you capture as much revenue or as much referral traffic as possible from the LLMs. And so that’s the way Gumshoe works. You can go to gumshoe.ai. They said you just start with the URL. And in 10 to 15 minutes, you’re going to walk away with sort of insights about what you can do. there’s, again, you don’t need an inter credit card that’s just freely available. Everyone can create an account. And then

The way we work is it’s not a subscription based a time based. If you want to rerun a report, you want to run it again, like in a weekly or monthly basis, kind of track how you’re doing, you would then sign up to pay an ongoing basis. And so it’s just based upon how often you want to sort of leverage the platform and use it. That’s the model. So feel free once you generate a report, whether it’s a free one or a paid one down the road, it’s available to you for as long as we’re around as a company.

John Jantsch (25:03.266)

Yeah. And one of the things that I failed to mention, you didn’t mention either is I thought does a really good job at, at, identifying competitors, as well. Yeah.

Todd Sawicki (25:12.466)

Correct, because what we’ll do is in those answers, we’re going to get multiple companies products recommendations and we surface that to know your competitive great great point, John, you know, your competitive standing, our competitors doing better or worse than you in AI. And that’s obviously often a key indicator. And then we’ll help you analyze where they did better versus you. So you know, what’s your point about messaging, right? And the product messaging, like what features of a competitor are winning versus ours?

where is their positioning better? Is it something else? Or and that’s sort of a great insight is where all the other companies getting mentioned alongside you, and then we’ll help you identify also, what were the reasons like what led to the models answering the way they did? Like what citations and sources so if you want to do outreach from a PR standpoint, you can we help you identify the places you should be going and talking to, or even read our core threads you should be posting on. We now have a feature where we’ll we’ll give you a draft post for Reddit and Cora.

John Jantsch (25:49.816)

Yeah.

Todd Sawicki (26:05.498)

Again, but it’s based upon, you know, strengths and weaknesses that we identified and said, here’s the things you should be talking about more to help you get more visibility to AI. And so that’s sort of the goal here is how do we help you talk back to AI. So you’re feeding it the features and benefits of your products. So they’ll talk about your products next time instead of someone else’s.

John Jantsch (26:26.878)

I’m sorry to sound like an ad for, for gum shoe, but you know, we actually took a lot of this long tail searches and built some ad campaigns around, around them as well.

Todd Sawicki (26:35.792)

We have heard that because the persona piece is great for that, like audience targeting and things like that. No, no, we’ve absolutely heard that, that there’s some interesting crossovers about this. Once you realize it’s messaging based, there’s a ton of things you can do with this data. It’s really, I’m not kidding about being a rabbit hole. Like you start reading the chats that we generate and surface. just, it becomes, it’s really fascinating to kind of see what’s being said in a way that you only ever got through focus groups or weird surveys before. And now and again, it like.

15 minutes, getting some really interesting insights. can then spend a lot of time diving into and learning from in a way that we just never had access to before.

John Jantsch (27:10.99)

Well, we’ve gone over time. appreciate you. Take it a few moments to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast is gum shoe dot AI and Todd again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Todd Sawicki (27:24.914)

Thank you very much. Appreciate the time and attention.

John Jantsch (00:02.52)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Todd Sawicki. He’s the founder and CEO of Gum Shoe AI, an innovative platform at the forefront of AI-driven search and discovery solutions. With a background in digital media marketing technology and leading high-growth startups, Todd is known for his deep insight into changing landscape of search. We’re going to talk about SEO, we’re going to talk about AIO, AEO, all the

Other rows that are out there.

Todd Sawicki (00:33.81)

As long as we don’t call it GEO, what, you can tell the person who came up with that had no background in marketing because I’m sorry, the minute I’ve been in the paid landscape, the minute you see the letters GEO, you instantly think of geo targeting, hello people, the last thing we wanna do is make anything more confusing than it might otherwise be. So, my little soapbox for today.

John Jantsch (00:48.622)

Sure,

John Jantsch (00:54.86)

And so with that, with that Todd’s on the show. So welcome Todd. So let’s, mean, I kind of laid that out a little bit. You know, you’ve created a tool that is really taking advantage of some of the changes that are going on in marketing today, especially around search. So maybe give a high level kind of in your view, let’s start with the basics. All this stuff we’re hearing about.

Todd Sawicki (01:10.609)

Yes.

John Jantsch (01:21.41)

GEO for one, AIO, AIO, know, all those kinds of things. I mean, what does it all really boil down to for the typical marketer or typical business?

Todd Sawicki (01:31.374)

It is a it is a good question. So I think we all woke up a year ago. And with the rise of zero click searches with AI mode in Google search taking off, and we began to see Google traffic starting to decline. And at the same time, if anyone was sort of looking at their, like GA four analytics or whatever they’re using, they started to see, look, I’m getting this new basket of traffic from chat, tbt and others. And so AI

John Jantsch (01:50.478)

Mm-hmm.

Todd Sawicki (01:58.706)

and sort of looking at that. so the AI search is taking off. And so as a marketer, suddenly you had to start paying to this attention, this new thing called AI search. And so fundamentally, we look at it as, you know, marketers want to understand what the hell are LMS saying about me. And then from a product standpoint, we like to say yes, we help marketers understand what LMS think about them and their brands, and ultimately what to do about it. And I think that’s one of the interesting things is there’s a lot more you can do about it, because AI search is a

fundamentally different platform and approach than traditional search and really in many ways I think a search is solving a lot of the problems we’ve been complaints as end users we’ve had about traditional search and then there’s downstream applications for marketers and how to think about how you work with those platforms as a result.

John Jantsch (02:45.262)

Well, and I think you’re hitting on one of the things that I try to get people to understand. Everybody always goes, oh, we’ve got these new platforms. Um, but what they fail sometimes to recognize is that the buyer behavior is changing because of these new platforms and how people, what their expectations are, how they now go to, even to Google. mean, I’m seeing people do this. We used to put it in these nice little compact searches. Well, I’m seeing people put in these very long searches now, very high intent, you know, very filtered almost because they know they can get AI overviews and things. And I think that.

Todd Sawicki (02:57.202)

Correct.

Todd Sawicki (03:09.039)

Exactly.

John Jantsch (03:15.222)

change is really what we really need to adjust to, right? It’s not necessarily the technology, is it?

Todd Sawicki (03:21.778)

I agree users have fundamentally changed and you probably hear this even anecdotally amongst your friend sets. Like you start kind of experimenting with chat tpt or perplexity or whatever it is and you’re like you ask it a real deep question that you know is very frustrating to get answered in traditional search and you would have to click through 10 things and it was just a pain in the ass and took a lot of time and where now you get a pretty good answer most of the time right away and it fundamentally changes the experience. I mean we’re seeing dramatic thing changes especially in complex areas like b2b type searches.

It’s a great use case when you’re researching very technical things. You’re researching like more long tail areas for traditional search work wonderfully in the world of AI. And I think the other thing that traditional search really did a poor job of, and it really shows up in AI search is AI search does a phenomenal job of personalizing its answers for you. And that is one of the things that

in even in terms of our own product and platform, but the implications of that are very interesting. And so as an end user rate, would you imagine think of the LM as you walk into a shoe store, and there’s a wall of 500 pairs of shoes behind that salesperson as you walk in, and the LM is the salesperson. And so you’re trying to know what’s the right pair of shoes? Well, Google you do it doesn’t really ever answer I need a new pair of shoes, you would never like Google just would struggle with that. But with

John Jantsch (04:43.488)

Or give you the most popular shoes or whatever.

Todd Sawicki (04:45.488)

Or give you the most popular one. Exactly. Just give you the most popular one. But the LLMs are really trying to understand, are you a runner? Are you a hiker? you have an account, you register, they’re building profiles of you, interestingly enough. Right? The minute you put your email in, it knows where you work. It knows what you’re affiliated with. And so as a result, your users are seeing that there really, there’s a value for that relationship between you and the LLMs. It learns more about who you are. It discovers things. It’s trying to personalize the answers. And so it therefore can give you a better answer and really help you in a way that

Traditional search never quite got to.

John Jantsch (05:18.252)

You know, and one of things that I get business owners pretty excited about, because a lot of them are going, is all hype or like, don’t, you know, do I got to really do this or am I really going to get AI traffic or not get AI traffic? So all these questions and all I do is show them analytics. and I am able to demonstrate that to them, the people who come from AI stay on your site 10 times longer and convert seven times more than your paid ads, more than your organic traffic. And a lot of that, think is just what you talked about because.

Todd Sawicki (05:43.602)

Yup.

John Jantsch (05:47.5)

they are doing the filtering themselves. And if they get to your website, it’s because you had what they wanted. Right.

Todd Sawicki (05:51.258)

Exactly. They’re pre-qualified. Right. No, and we’re seeing stats on the B to C. We typically see a little bit less than seven X, probably more in the range of kind of two to five X increased conversions on the B to B side. We’re seeing increased conversion rates up to like 20 X better. Cause again, they’re down the funnel. Cause right. When I think about, you think of from a marketer standpoint, let’s think about the classic marketing funnel. There’s discovery, then consideration, then conversion.

Google managed discovery and then handed you off to websites to manage consideration like your own website some third-party writer whatever it might be but AI is trying to do not just discovery but manage through the Q &A process consideration as well and then hand that user off for conversion and So that’s why you see these higher conversion rates. They’re further down the funnel AI has managed that now from a marketing standpoint You’re now your challenges. I need to manage AI differently because now suddenly it’s it’s the one selling my product

John Jantsch (06:49.09)

Yeah, yeah.

Todd Sawicki (06:49.35)

And I think that’s the fundamental shift here as a marketer is you have to going back to that, that shoe store analogy, that element as a salesperson means you’re going to have to manage that person, right? That’s not your job. Whereas SEO, and I think this is one of the other big changes. SEO is a very technical thing, like link building. And remember that the just the ridiculous debate we had for years about is it a sub domain or a folder? Right? Is that marketing? No, that’s a very technical thing. And you know, any non technical marketer, whenever that discussion and by the way,

for those who don’t pay attention that went on for years like it was like a red versus blue sort of battle in the online marketing sphere. And but a very technical thing not marketing based at all. And I think the differences for LLMs, it’s much more of a, oh, how do I teach the LLMs what to say about my product, just like I teach, you know, a salesperson at the front of Dick’s Sporting Goods store kind of the same way. And so it’s now it’s much more of a product marketing exercise than it ever was with traditional search. And I think that’s the other thing is

You’re going to have to think about how you talk to the LLMs and how you market to them.

John Jantsch (07:50.35)

Well, and this gets at the crux of, you know, a good salesperson is trained on, know, all the objections of, you know, all the questions they’re going to get. Right. And so now all of a sudden our content has to be answers.

Todd Sawicki (07:57.222)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Todd Sawicki (08:04.722)

Correct? absolutely. So one of the things, so Gumshoo as a platform has been, we publicly launched it about six months ago and we’ve already worked more than 3,500 marketers have signed up. We’ve already generated millions of prompts on behalf of marketers so they understand what elements say in response to these prompts. And as a result, we’re able to analyze those response. think it’s like 10 million answers that we’ve analyzed.

John Jantsch (08:29.112)

Mm-hmm.

Todd Sawicki (08:30.416)

And then you really, you start to see patterns in what they’re doing, but they absolutely want you as marketers to provide them kind of sample question answers back. if you, of the fascinating things about LLMs is they actually link, they prefer the number one source that they link to for product information are brand websites. And then within that, they link to product description pages or PDPs or product detail pages, whatever description you want to use, like the PDPs, FAQs,

John Jantsch (08:50.616)

Mm-hmm.

Todd Sawicki (08:59.896)

knowledge base articles, how to sections, they love that sort of informative how to answer questions for them. And they use that as a guide. Now they process their own way, they kind of regurgitate it in their own way, but they want to use that as a basis. So you’re right, you’re gonna you have to just like you train that salesperson on Rude Q &A, you’re doing the same thing now with the models, which I think is interesting to marketers, when they start kind of like seeing and understanding like it’s not a marketing exercise, and not a weird technical link building sub domain folder esoteric discussion anymore.

John Jantsch (09:04.738)

Yep. Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:25.292)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and one of the things that we have seen, because, know, I’ve always believed that, that you do content, right. You’re going to get rewarded by the search engines. Well, we’ve been doing content, right. In my view, you know, hub pages, structured content, FAQs, table of contents, summaries, schema, you know, we’ve been doing all that stuff because it was good content marketing. well,

Todd Sawicki (09:37.244)

Yes.

John Jantsch (09:52.258)

the LLMs and AI are actually rewarding us for that work right now because we ranked high in Google. We are now ranking higher in AI overviews and in chat GPT. Are you seeing that as well?

Todd Sawicki (10:06.354)

So if you don’t have content online, it is hard for AI to even know you exist. And so that’s sort of step one. You’d be surprised at the lack of content out there. It’s, know, all right, well, you sell it. You sell these programs. But I think it’s because everyone probably thinks they’ve all, everyone’s done content marketing. It’s not always the case.

John Jantsch (10:12.526)

Well, yeah.

Well, no, no, I would not be surprised.

Yeah. Yeah. I always love it. I always love it when we go to work with a new client and they say, yeah, well, our SEO firm is doing this for us. And it’s like, what are they SEOing? Like, there’s no content there.

Todd Sawicki (10:35.83)

There you go. Exactly. There’s no content. There’s nothing else. And so the differences here you mentioned, like you generated content that the difference here though is there’s a subtle, you know, benefit and you kind of address this, I’m gonna call it what you said, which is you’re getting rewarded. But what’s interesting is Google, it was rewarding popularity, not necessarily the best content and the most authoritative content. What LMS are doing is doing a much better job of rewarding the correct content. So

It’s sort of like, and we have a good stator on this, is, we look up the traditional Google rank of all the URLs that are cited by AI and its answer, and its justification for its answers. The traditional Google rank is below 21, 50 to 90 % of the time, meaning page three and beyond. So it’s pulling out these, so it is looking at some of those that traditionally link to content SEO, but it was always these deep links. And the problem with traditional searchers,

John Jantsch (11:18.658)

Well, yes.

Todd Sawicki (11:28.602)

is, you know, we kind of generically use the stat one out of 100 people go to page two on Google, one out of 1000 go to page three, one out of 10,000 go to page four, and no one goes to page five. And that’s very exactly how the dead bodies but AI to my stat 59 % of the links they surface are in that that sort of buried into because they have AI or machines, they have infinite patients. So what they’re good at doing is finding authoritatively correct like we like to see canonical information. And then and so as a brand,

John Jantsch (11:38.734)

Yeah, that’s where you hide the dead bodies, right?

John Jantsch (11:51.15)

Yeah.

Todd Sawicki (11:58.416)

all that work that maybe struggled to get surfaced in Google, because it just wasn’t as popular or using out to people buying links. Now, now they’re really to your point, really rewarding good content, good highly valued structured content. And so it’s sort of like, it’s sort of the it’s paying off 10 years of work, finally. And so the people who may be struggled to get some of that popularity in Google, it is absolutely paying off in AI overview, AI search and AI overviews and things like that in a way that you always prayed and hoped for as a content market, like your day has come.

John Jantsch (12:07.842)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:13.964)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:26.35)

Yeah

Todd Sawicki (12:26.716)

Producing great content is a payoff and it’s happening. And I think that’s really fascinating here, which is people are like, with the rise of AI Slop, no, the models want good content and they’re good at deducing what is good content. AI Slop will not get ranked and you have to, they want authoritative information. And so that’s content that will get ranked in AI search and then drive traffic today and tomorrow, agentic purchases, right? You’re ultimately trying to drive some of that conversion more and more that AI will be driving that itself. Like Perplexity’s browser will load a cart for you today.

Right, it’s loading products it’s picking on your behalf into that. So that future is coming fast and furiously. And so I think that change is sort of fascinating to see when you look at what’s happening. Now, the other stat about what’s really fascinating here is, okay, what if I don’t have been produced 10 years of content, am I screwed? Well, one of the other facts that we’ve seen is that the average age of a cited piece of content

is only 86 days old in AI search. And that’s falling 10 to 15 % quarter per quarter. Now there’s a caveat there, which is it doesn’t have to be originally published, it just has to be updated. Like the AI will look at content that’s older, but as long as it’s been updated, and you note that that updated date, it will value that as well. And so and that 86 days is falling 10 to 15 % every quarter. So today it’s 86 days, next quarter is gonna be 78, 70 to the quarter after that, and see you get faster and faster.

So you’re gonna have to be doing a lot more work around content, maintaining it, updating it. It’s not a publish once and walk away model anymore. It’s gonna be a constant refresh. And so, the good side of that is you’re just starting out. We’ve definitely seen this with people where you can impact the results well within a 90 day window where traditional search that was almost impossible. And so there’s a definitely, don’t wait, get started. Hire John and his team.

John Jantsch (14:12.504)

But again, yeah, well, but I was also going to say that another best practice for years has been repurpose your content. And so, I mean, I now it’s like repurpose your content in a specific way, you know, add FAQs, you know, to that content, right? But, but I think that’s what you’re saying is should be very helpful for those people that just kind of wrote the hundred one off blog posts. It’s like, no, now go back and make that pay. Let’s talk specifically.

Todd Sawicki (14:28.146)

Correct. Right.

Todd Sawicki (14:39.94)

Exactly, exactly. It’s fascinating to kind of, you know, watch that all happen and come to fruition.

John Jantsch (14:42.742)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s talk specifically about gumshoe. I know that’s what you want to talk about. But first off, I have an account. I’ve played with it and it is in seemingly incredibly complex what you’ve built. And so my first question is, my first question is, where did that come from? Are you a mad scientist or did you hire people or how did you develop that? Because

Todd Sawicki (15:02.844)

Well, thank you.

Todd Sawicki (15:10.77)

So we have a team, right? We have a team. I’ve been in digital marketing tech for 20 years in my career and got involved in, and really the common theme has been around customer acquisition as it turns out. And I even view the purpose, we only care about AI search as marketers, ultimately because it can drive business, right? It’ll drive traffic and revenue, right? So fundamentally it’s a, and so I 20 years ago got involved in toolbars and search. Then I got into the social marketing landscape, just as that was taking off like 2007 to,

John Jantsch (15:28.334)

That’s right. That’s right.

Todd Sawicki (15:39.986)

to 2012 and then got into paid and built a DSP. So in the programmatic space and then was playing in ecommerce and Shopify’s ecosystem, you building customer acquisition apps in there and then ultimately transition here. And it was sort of the space of a year ago was talking to marketers. And again, the beginning of this conversation around AI search and the rise of that. And if you’re a marketer, and suddenly the channel you’re relying on Google search falls off a cliff. for some key keywords, I heard

30 60, even 90 % declines in traffic, even on the paid side. Like it just Google is sacrificing even paid traffic and on some keywords. So that’s an existential change in the landscape. And then as we started thinking about this in terms of working with marketers, you’re like, well, you know, to what I said earlier, gumshoe helps brands understand what elements think about them. And then what to do about it. Well, that where does that come from? Well, if you’re a marketer, you can’t just log into chat tpt and find out what it’s saying to you because

John Jantsch (16:12.813)

Mm.

Todd Sawicki (16:37.508)

as you I don’t know if any everyone should go watch the season premiere this fall’s episode from Boulder natives, you know, the creators of South Park, the first episode this year, the main one of the main characters dads is like falling in love with chat tbt because all it does is flatter him. And it says like every idea he has is wonderful. And it’s a great and he’s got some he’s trying to start a new business. And his wife gets all pissed off because he’s constantly going to ask chat tbt and says see I’m right, you know,

John Jantsch (16:54.285)

Right.

Todd Sawicki (17:05.426)

his wife’s name is Sharon, see I’m white Sharon, chat TBT says I’m right. And he’s like, No, it just says that to everybody. And so as a marketer, you you can’t just log in and ask chat TBT what it thinks about your business, because it’s going to kind of lie, it’s going to flatter you, it’s going to say the most optimal thing it can because it by the way, the minute you put your email in, it looks you up on LinkedIn, it knows it knows where you work, it knows your products, it’s no it knows how to answer things. And so then you realize as a marketer, I don’t care what LM say to me, I say, I care what it says to my target customers.

John Jantsch (17:17.666)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (17:31.832)

Yeah. Yeah.

Todd Sawicki (17:34.01)

And so the way that we built our product was around how do you help marketers understand what it’s really saying to its customers? And so our point of view as well, how do we get in the shoes of that customer? And so what we do is we build these personas which become synthetic users. right, so those are what are asking prompts in the models. We have a better understanding of how they, how will they talk to, how the models speak to these different, different customers and those insights of like, okay, here’s how it, and by the way, the variety of answers between one type of

persona and another is fascinating. And they’re absolutely customizing their answers. Like, John, you’ve seen this, right? Just one customer will say, like, just imagine you’re a hiker, you’re going to get a different answer for the pair of shoes than if you’re a marathon runner. And so that makes rational sense as a marketer kind of understanding this nuance and how it’s treating different types of end users using AI search is sort of a fascinating insight. And it’s cool just to look at the answers and see what they say to different things. So that’s my point about marketers and the messaging and seeing how it talks to different people.

John Jantsch (18:06.594)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:31.374)

One of my first observations that kind of blew me away frankly was I just put in a company’s URL, I think is all I did. yeah, and it came up with, I want to say eight, maybe it was a little more than that personas. And they were, we had already done that work, but they were very spot on, maybe even a little better descriptions. And what I found was interesting was it actually,

Todd Sawicki (18:39.324)

Correct, that’s what you start with. You start with the URL, correct.

John Jantsch (19:00.342)

All the analytics and search was great, but we actually got some messaging ideas just from that part of it, and that wasn’t even the intent.

Todd Sawicki (19:10.652)

Well, and that’s what I mean about it. you know, it’s, was talking with a head of product marketing earlier today, and I’m like, this is product marketing’s moment, because AI search is fundamentally a product marketing exercise. And it’s a positioning exercise. And when you read those prompts and answers, we hear that all the time, because what we help you on what we ask questions and basically ask questions around product areas for your business. And those will give you a set of responses like, we recommend these three companies or these eight companies or these five. And then you see the rationale for those

recommendations. And that’s great marketing, right at feedback. It’s it’s what’s our positioning, what’s our competitive positioning, you show this to any product market, like, oh, my god, this is like my competitive messaging framework, which you’d by the way, what you describe john a itself serve, can do this yourself, anyone can enter a URL of a company to get this. And in like 10 to 15 minutes, you’re walking away with a really cool understanding of your products position in the marketplace, at least the marketplace of AI search, which is meant to be a broader perspective of the world, obviously.

But it’s no, hear this all the time. It’s fascinating. Like it is a total rabbit hole for anyone who cares about commutative or comparative messaging.

John Jantsch (20:13.742)

Yeah. So the other observation is that, you know, lot of people that are talking about losing search traffic, it’s for, let’s say I’m a remodeling contractor. It’s they’re losing traffic for trends in kitchens, right? Which was not somebody that was going to buy anything, right? They’re losing a lot of that traffic because they’d written a great trend article for 2025, right?

Todd Sawicki (20:37.138)

Correct.

John Jantsch (20:38.37)

But that was not going to ever convert. But what’s interesting from what you’re unearthing is you’re unearthing all these really high intent searches. I mean, the search string is such that it’s like, yeah, that person’s looking to remodel their kitchen. And I think that that’s what marketers need to really focus on is that, forget about the, I mean, we do still have to do a lot of things to create awareness. But what we really need to focus on is high intent right now and capturing that search.

Todd Sawicki (21:07.138)

That is absolutely, I think a change, which is you’re going to go a little bit more down funnel. And you because you I think you can with AI search problem with Google is all those searches were so high level and so generic. It was hard to, to you’re right, the lack of long detailed searches in Google meant it was hard as a market, you couldn’t really target that sort of bottom of funnel activity. But AI is kind of all about that. And even if you ask a generic question, AI will follow it up with a more specific like they want to, they want to know which direction they need to go. There’s a back and forth that never existed in Google search.

John Jantsch (21:16.962)

Yeah, right.

Todd Sawicki (21:35.878)

that absolutely exists in AI. And you anyone who’s experienced this, when you go to the models, it’ll it’ll ask for follow ups, it’ll clarify things, it’ll make sure it understands what you’re talking about. So that it’s its goal is to give you the very best answer possible.

John Jantsch (21:41.932)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (21:48.686)

Yeah, it wouldn’t have been great. You go to Google and say, no, that answer was wrong. Fix it, right?

Todd Sawicki (21:52.324)

Exactly, we all wish we could like that search, you’ll get some results. You’re like, that is a terrible right link. And now with all the like the amount of Google searches that are so link baited to death. I love to get the analogy of in a lot, you know, I said earlier, the AI search is fixing a lot of things wrong with traditional search, like how many times in our lives like you bought like a new TV, and I just need to know the damn matter the width of it. So will it fit on my mantle or not? And you do a search and like you get every link is 10 best this or 10 best that or trends of

hot TVs this Christmas like I just need the dang measurement. Come on, Google.

John Jantsch (22:23.854)

or a link to Amazon that’s not even a TV. Those are my favorite. So I’m sorry, we got geeking out here on like all the under the hood stuff. And I’d love it you could just like give us the two minutes feel what is gumshoe? How you know, how does it work? How does somebody try it out?

Todd Sawicki (22:28.187)

Right!

Todd Sawicki (22:42.556)

So at any market, it’s a publicly available and you can try it out for free. It is, you can generate a report about your company. You go to it, as John said, you’re going to enter your company’s URL. And then from there, what we’re gonna do is again, show you what LMS think about your business and product. You’re gonna select a product that’ll generate personas and then we’ll generate the prompts that represent the activity that users are having with AI. And then…

run a series of real-time conversations, we turn those personas effectively into synthetic users. That’s kind of a buzzy word. Synthetic is the ultimate now AI buzzword. It’s a simulated user, it’s a synthetic user. And then that user will, yeah, exactly. It’s better than that. We’ll have a series of conversations with the LLMs. We kind of create those and then we analyze the chat activity and kind of package that up in a way so that you can help identify areas, topics of these types of prompts where you’re doing well or you’re doing poorly.

John Jantsch (23:14.648)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (23:18.83)

It’s better than bot though, isn’t it?

Todd Sawicki (23:38.736)

And then the next step is we also allow you to sort of then generate the content based upon, you know, where your strengths and weaknesses are that through our platform that you can then host on your site. And the way to think of it is, is your personas are your predicted customers, who the elements think are your top customers, and then they want instructions, the content you generate is intended to be or write on your own, is intended to be the instruction set back to the models. Okay, for these customers, here’s the features and benefits that we believe appeal to them and why they want to pick our products.

And ultimately, that’s going to send traffic back to your site. And then can help analyze that to understand was it good traffic, bad traffic, what have you. And so the goal of our point of view is to say, again, how do we help you understand what I’m thinking about you and then what to do about it, right? You’re ultimately how do you capture as much revenue or as much referral traffic as possible from the LLMs. And so that’s the way Gumshoe works. You can go to gumshoe.ai. They said you just start with the URL. And in 10 to 15 minutes, you’re going to walk away with sort of insights about what you can do. there’s, again, you don’t need an inter credit card that’s just freely available. Everyone can create an account. And then

The way we work is it’s not a subscription based a time based. If you want to rerun a report, you want to run it again, like in a weekly or monthly basis, kind of track how you’re doing, you would then sign up to pay an ongoing basis. And so it’s just based upon how often you want to sort of leverage the platform and use it. That’s the model. So feel free once you generate a report, whether it’s a free one or a paid one down the road, it’s available to you for as long as we’re around as a company.

John Jantsch (25:03.266)

Yeah. And one of the things that I failed to mention, you didn’t mention either is I thought does a really good job at, at, identifying competitors, as well. Yeah.

Todd Sawicki (25:12.466)

Correct, because what we’ll do is in those answers, we’re going to get multiple companies products recommendations and we surface that to know your competitive great great point, John, you know, your competitive standing, our competitors doing better or worse than you in AI. And that’s obviously often a key indicator. And then we’ll help you analyze where they did better versus you. So you know, what’s your point about messaging, right? And the product messaging, like what features of a competitor are winning versus ours?

where is their positioning better? Is it something else? Or and that’s sort of a great insight is where all the other companies getting mentioned alongside you, and then we’ll help you identify also, what were the reasons like what led to the models answering the way they did? Like what citations and sources so if you want to do outreach from a PR standpoint, you can we help you identify the places you should be going and talking to, or even read our core threads you should be posting on. We now have a feature where we’ll we’ll give you a draft post for Reddit and Cora.

John Jantsch (25:49.816)

Yeah.

Todd Sawicki (26:05.498)

Again, but it’s based upon, you know, strengths and weaknesses that we identified and said, here’s the things you should be talking about more to help you get more visibility to AI. And so that’s sort of the goal here is how do we help you talk back to AI. So you’re feeding it the features and benefits of your products. So they’ll talk about your products next time instead of someone else’s.

John Jantsch (26:26.878)

I’m sorry to sound like an ad for, for gum shoe, but you know, we actually took a lot of this long tail searches and built some ad campaigns around, around them as well.

Todd Sawicki (26:35.792)

We have heard that because the persona piece is great for that, like audience targeting and things like that. No, no, we’ve absolutely heard that, that there’s some interesting crossovers about this. Once you realize it’s messaging based, there’s a ton of things you can do with this data. It’s really, I’m not kidding about being a rabbit hole. Like you start reading the chats that we generate and surface. just, it becomes, it’s really fascinating to kind of see what’s being said in a way that you only ever got through focus groups or weird surveys before. And now and again, it like.

15 minutes, getting some really interesting insights. can then spend a lot of time diving into and learning from in a way that we just never had access to before.

John Jantsch (27:10.99)

Well, we’ve gone over time. appreciate you. Take it a few moments to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast is gum shoe dot AI and Todd again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Todd Sawicki (27:24.914)

Thank you very much. Appreciate the time and attention.

John Jantsch (00:01.506)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and I’m doing a solo show. I’m going to talk about search engine optimization or as I’ve started to call it search visibility because the game has changed. Now, the first question you might be asking yourself is why is John wearing a cowboy hat? Those of you that are on the video version, I’m wearing a Stetson open road. this is the straw version in the cognac.

color is my favorite summer hat. just decided it’s Friday when I’m recording this. just decided to put it on and wear it for the show. My grandfather and father had this style hat and a number of US presidents over the years chose this as their primary hat as well. So Stetson Open Road, there you have the story. All right. As I said, I’m going to talk about search engine optimization, what we’ve always long called, not always.

Believe it or not, a 20 year history with something called search engine optimization, which is really moving completely. There’s been lots of changes over the years, different algorithms, different things, different search engines come along. But this is a fundamental shift in how that tactic or approach really is going to be applied going forward. And what what it actually is even going to mean to business and website owners going forward as well.

So I thought I would start with, before I jump into like eat and generative AI and AI overviews and things, just do like a 30 second kind of timeline on search. Well, I started actually playing around with search in 1998. And really, again, was my first website and it was, do we rank?

and get on page one, you know, what are the things we need to do? I won’t go into all what all those things were, but most of them are not relevant today. At least, you know, that was in the early days of search engines. They were little infants and they were, you know, the game was to trick them into putting your stuff on page one. That lasted till about 2010. And then, you know, the search engines just got more and more complex and more and more, you know,

John Jantsch (02:21.142)

ability to understand what a page really was about rather than what we wanted them to think it was about. And so now you start having mobile be part of the deal. You’ve got the local search packs. You’ve got answer boxes starting to show up about, you know, from 2010 to 2016, roll up to about 2017. And now all of sudden voice search is a factor featured snippets become a factor.

near me becomes a factor also searched for. So a lot of things just keep getting injected. And of course, all the while the ad units and how they display all over the page, you know, are changing as well. Kind of really shifting what even ranking, you know, on page one even meant anymore. So I guess fast forward to today, 2024 or so it happened, you know, AI overviews.

Um, SGE from Google, 60 % of, of, of us Google searches ending with no click at all, according to search engine land, uh, the, uh, the infamous zero click searches, uh, instead of, you know, a list of 10 links on a page. Um, you know, we’re now to the point where maybe you get featured as a source in an AI answer and hope that that generates a click, but,

six to seven times out of 10 today. That search is just gonna end in somebody getting the answer or getting the information that they wanted.

What I’m talking about now is this idea of a complete mindset shift away from search and optimization, away from trying to rank for keywords and more about this idea of search visibility. It’s kind of your brand’s share of the answers, the mentions, the knowledge panel, real estate, local pack slots.

John Jantsch (04:19.086)

really clicks for everywhere that, um, that, that a prospect looks, I think that’s what we have to do today. So, you know, chasing one phrase or two phrases or something. mean, it’s really going to have very, very little value. Um, unless it’s just a very high intent phrase that, uh, if somebody searches that they’re not looking for an answer, they’re looking to purchase. Um, those are really going to be the, um, you know, the, the, the highly sought after, guess, um, types of searches.

So I think instead of, of thinking now in terms of like position ranking or impressions, it’s really going to be this, this whole collection. And this is going to be hard for people to measure, but this whole collection of like branded SERP coverage, is really going to be the, you know, the, example. I use a case, a local dentist publishes like does whitening hurt. they have an FAQ short vid, TikTok video, Google business posts, a patient story.

you know, now that now they have the chance to actually own the FAQ snippet for that, maybe the local, local rank, map pack for that, maybe a YouTube carousel. mean, so that’s how I think we have to start thinking about these is, know, there’s no more. There’s no more, you know, I want to show up on for this, you know, key search is it’s how do I put myself into this idea of answers? And in fact, you know, a lot of people are actually calling,

you know, not even calling them search engines anymore. They’re really answer engines. And the consumer behavior, you know, has changed so dramatically. Search behavior has changed so dramatically. You know, we were all very conditioned to type in six, eight words for what we were looking for and then hoping or maybe refining that search if we didn’t find what we were hoping for. But now we can actually, instead of typing in, you know, plumbing contractor in my town, you know, now it’s

plumbing contractor with 24 hour service, more than 4.7 star reviews within two miles from me, whatever. mean, you can type that long search in now and you’re going to get that very specific, in most cases, you’re gonna get that very specific result returned to you that you were able to kind of custom tailor to what you wanted rather than saying, okay, Google, give me what you think I want.

John Jantsch (06:49.39)

One of the things that, and I have to set this up a little bit, that we have to start thinking about when it comes to our content, you know, writing the 101, the how to blog content. And many people are finding that they’re losing all the search traffic that used to come for that because why would they send them to your page? They can answer that very easily because it was just basic information to begin with.

you’re wasting your time. If you continue down that path of just creating the 700 words on blah, blah, blah. very generic. And the bad thing is of course AI makes that really easy to do. You can, you can spin out 10 of those a day now, without really much sweat, it’s, it’s practically useless unless you are in just such a niche category that nobody else is trying to create content around it. It’s practically worthless. So Google has this new

No, fairly new couple of years, acronym called EAT. And there’s two E’s in there. So E-E-A-T. And forgive me if you know all about this, but I’ll explain it in very basic terms for those who may not understand it. But the idea behind it is that they want to see not just expertise. That’s one of the E’s, but they want to see experience. Have you actually done what you’re talking about?

They want to see authoritativeness. That’s the, the other a, or I mean, that’s the a. So they measure that by, know, are you getting links mentioned, you know, are you in local press? I mean, are you appearing in industry lists? So they’re measuring like, are you an authority on this thing that you’re talking about? So experience, expertise, authority, and then the last one is trustworthiness. are there signals, of trust, warranties, refund policies, secure checkout badges.

real contact info. mean, all those kinds of things go into the mix as well. So what we have to do, I think, is it’s no longer enough to write this article about how to do something. You have to actually have a case study in there. You have to have examples of maybe you doing it in actual real time or behind the scenes.

John Jantsch (09:02.603)

So that it’s very clear that that you’re not just talking about this. This is something that you do. This is something you’re an expert on. This is something somebody can trust for you to do for their business.

John Jantsch (09:16.844)

So in March, 2024, I’m reading a stat here. Knowledge graph update extended each signals by 38 % to really surface credible people and brands again, according to search engine land. that certainly signals that this is not going away. I mean, that this is going to be a significant piece as well. So how do you compete in an eat world, in an AI world?

In a world where really the need for producing content is still there. mean consumers still need the information So now it’s a matter of you know, how do we how do we stay visible so that we can get them the opportunity even to get them that information? first thing is There’s five step plan here, right? Okay. Number one audit your content gaps. So

Export all of your site URLs. List the top 25 customer questions and use Google Search Console. Again, what we’re trying to do is find how can we become an answer engine? So take a lot of your content. And again, this is a place where some of the AI tools are really good at this. You’ve written good, useful content. How could it be better? How could it answer more questions? How could you add FAQs?

to the end of all of your service pages. How could you add a table of contents to your long form content? How could you add a description box? Some people call it too long, didn’t read TLDR, you’ve probably seen that. How can you add that at the top of your content so that these…

They’re not really search engine spiders, but so that the AI tools that are going out there and trying to surface good sources for content can have a very quick view of what it’s about. It gets very user friendly. It’s very structured in a way that shows kind of the hierarchical structure.

John Jantsch (11:24.718)

I have for years been talking about this thing called hub pages. Um, and the idea behind that is that if you write about, I use an example, if you’re a kitchen remodeler and you’ve got a whole bunch of blog posts about various aspects of remodeling a kitchen. Um, what if you turn that instead of just having them randomly placed on a blog, uh, out there in the ether, what if you turn that into a kitchen, uh, the ultimate guide to remodeling a kitchen and you took all of your content that you’ve written over the years.

And you placed it on that page. don’t mean physically all of it on that page, but at least structure it in such a way that somebody can jump around to how to pick countertops, how to pick cabinets, how to pick finishes, um, how to pick lighting. And then those all, uh, you know, kind of becomes a playlist for anybody who’s thinking about, uh, designing, um, or remodeling a kitchen. So we’ve been talking about that for, I would say at least eight or 10 years.

and the good news is it was a very effective SEO tactic. mean, it, as soon as we would build those for people, it would immediately change, how, how Google viewed their website, but it’s also very user friendly. Somebody comes to that hub page and they want, they are interested in information. It’s like, here’s the whole guide, you know, on what I’m trying to do rather than I just found one, you know, I went out and randomly searched and found one, one blog post on something. So the, the, you know, the,

Again, doubly good news is that those pages really are highly rewarded in an AI world as well. So think about your top three or four services, your top three or four products, your top three or four things that your company does. And think about ways that you could create a very useful guide or a hub page around those and collect it. It’s really, in some ways, it’s the same content. You’ve just structured it dramatically different. Boy.

FAQs, and again, in an answer engine world, having answers to the questions that people ask is a clearly makes a lot of sense. It’s also been a very useful piece of content anyway, but now really being rewarded in this answer engine world. So every single one of your service pages, every single one of your product pages, even your About Us page now, I think should actually, whether it’s structured as a Q &A, or just has an FAQ section,

John Jantsch (13:42.826)

at the bottom of it and you know, pay some attention to the questions you’re being asked. Again, the AI tools are pretty good at that surfacing, you know, common questions around things, but you might think in terms of even some of the questions that you’re not being asked necessarily, but you should be people should be paying attention to so you can use that as an opportunity to educate around like why you and what you know, what you do that’s different than competitors, for example, that they might not actually be asking about.

You know, monthly case studies, you know, measurable results, quotes from customers, those kind of trust elements, even, you know, badges that, that symbolize that you’re in professional organizations and things that you’ve achieved certain certifications. mean, those, you know, the more we can double down on, on just proving that we do what we say, really quite frankly, the better. and then the last piece of the puzzle is.

John Jantsch (14:43.128)

How can you keep this fresh? So, what I’m telling people, and I need to do this myself as well, is we’ve got reams and reams of content that we wrote years ago. it needs to be freshened up. In fact, about every quarter, you ought to make a goal of saying, Hey, I’ve got these five blog posts that, know, are decent blog posts. How could I freshen them up, add more links, add more experience, add more proof.

in these, maybe I can structure them, you know, with a table of contents in that TLDR, maybe I could add FAQs to them. You will be highly rewarded for for refreshing that content. And I would last thing I would say is. Start thinking, and this is particularly true for local businesses, not as much for somebody who’s really more of a national scale, but that Google business page, think of it as another

publishing platform. Now you don’t own that platform, of course, but you have a lot of leeway and how optimized it is all the photos, the videos that you can add there, all the service descriptions you can add there. And you can post there. I would be taking again, in some cases daily if you’ve got a lot of content, but certainly weekly, create a Google or post in your Google Business page that can come from

can be just a shortened version of something that you’ve written, and published, you know, years ago, but you’re giving it a new place, a new home. And again, it’s just going to add all up to the soup of, know, how you get noted or, or quoted as a valuable source. The other thing I would tell you to do is to do a bunch of searches, in some of the AI tools that there were searches you’d love to show up in, you’d love to win. Now, hopefully you show up in front of those. So.

I use my kitchen contractor, remodeling contractor. So best kitchen remodeling contractor in X city would be a link that or something that they’d want to really show up for. Right. And take note of who shows up. That’s important. But also one of the things the AI tools do is they tell you the sources that they went to, to, to make that determination. And in some cases, these are directories in some cases, you know,

John Jantsch (17:03.63)

common in the remodeling industry is one called house, that, they actually got a lot of that information from. So if you’re not participating in any of those sources or you don’t even have a listing in a directory as obscure as it may sound, there’s your checklist of some things that you probably need to add to, what you do to get in those directories or to start participating in, you know, a Quora or a Reddit or a house, dependent upon,

you know, the industry that you’re in. So, all right, a couple of common mistakes. Stop obsessing over a handful of head keywords. It just doesn’t matter anymore. Don’t write for algorithms. I think this has always been true. Think in terms of the human question behind any query that somebody is asking. We use a tool called Answer the Public. I highly recommend that you go there and…

If you’re, if you’re at a loss for what questions people are asking in your industry, that can be a great resource for that. Frankly, the AI tools are pretty good at it. They can surface what questions people are asking in, certain industries. You can’t set and forget your website. You know, if I go and I look and there’s your last blog post was 2022. We probably got some work to do. This is something that.

You just need to make it a weekly, monthly, quarterly plan that you’re going to do X, Y, and Z and just commit to doing it. don’t obsess over all the tools. mean, don’t go down the rabbit hole. mean, Structured schema is important. there are plugins that, that can actually do that. So that when you write FAQs, the, underlying code, tells Google or tells the.

Whoever’s visiting your website, this is an FAQ section. So, you know, spend some time on that part. Don’t over obsess about, you know, over engineering tools on this. So here’s what I would say. If you’ve got some ideas today, pick one. If you don’t have any FAQs, that’s where I would start. If you don’t have any case studies, I would certainly think in terms of that.

John Jantsch (19:23.666)

if you haven’t visited your Google business profile, I would highly recommend that you think in terms of your strategy there. pick, pick one of the things that, that, I mentioned here today and just start working away at it. mean, don’t, don’t listen to all the gloom and doom and look at your Google analytics and say, my traffic search your traffic’s down because

there’s a good chance that a lot of that search traffic wasn’t that meaningful. Anyway, it was somebody looking for that how to article. They were not actually looking for your product or service. So search visibility being seen where people go to get their information, being seen as an answer engine, as opposed to an information engine is how we have to change the mindset. So if you got value, hopefully you will subscribe either to the YouTube channel or to the podcast itself.

Love those reviews on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen, share the interview, share this episode with, one business owner who needs a little marketing clarity, who would like a little, simple, effective and affordable, good old duct tape marketing practical advice. All right. That’s it for today. Thanks for tuning in. Hopefully I’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.