Meredith's husband: 0:24

A-I-O. Have you heard these terms?

Meredith: 0:26

Yeah, I actually have heard these terms.

Meredith's husband: 0:29

Yeah, If you have. If you're listening and these are new terms to you, you're going to probably start to hear these terms.

Meredith: 0:34

And freak out.

Meredith's husband: 0:36

Yes, and you don't need to freak out, but they stand for A-I-O is artificial intelligence optimization and G-E-O is generative engine optimization.

Meredith: 0:47

What's the difference?

Meredith's husband: 0:48

Nothing I'm going to tell you, really. I'm going to tell you, I'm going to let you in on a little SEO industry secret. These terms are made up, these terms are practically meaningless.

Meredith: 1:01

What do you mean? They're meaningless.

Meredith's husband: 1:03

It's just SEO. It's still SEO.

Meredith: 1:06

Then why are they calling it different things? They?

Meredith's husband: 1:08

are calling it different things. They are calling it different things and the people who started these trends. This was started by SEO agencies. So an agency. So the way I talk about SEO is there's agencies and there's consultants. The SEO agencies are companies or even professionals who are going to do your SEO for you, okay. Okay, consultants are going to help train your team, like I'm a consultant. Right, I used to run an SEO agency For 15 years. I ran an agency, so I had a team. People would hire us. We would do their SEO for them. Right Now, I'm a consultant. These terms originated with agencies because agencies are always trying to differentiate themselves from other agencies, saying oh, we do AIO, we don't do SEO, we do AIO and GEO. I can't even tell you how many times over the last 20 years that new terms have been invented VMO, smo, mmo, like GMO, smo, mmo, like all these things. It's just SEO.

Meredith: 2:10

It's still SEO.

Meredith's husband: 2:11

It's SEO If it results from a search engine. If it happens in a search engine like Google, ai Mode or ChatGPT, which is just using Bing, both of those are using search engines.

Meredith: 2:24

It's just SEO, so don't freak out when you hear these terms, you don't have to do anything new, because, everyone's freaking out.

Meredith's husband: 2:32

Yeah, I know, it's not new. Don't freak out, because I can tell people are all of a sudden thinking oh my God, I don't need SEO. I just was learning SEO. That's all irrelevant. Now I need to learn this new AIO and throwing everything else in the trash. Yes, don't do that. You do not need to do that.

Meredith: 2:52

Okay, good to know.

Meredith's husband: 2:54

This is just the next evolution in SEO. Seo is the one thing that is constant in SEO is that it's always changing. Right Now, this is, I will admit, the biggest change. I mean at least since 2012. Wow, probably since 2006, maybe ever, but it's a huge change. But it is, I will tell you, a very exciting time in SEO, because people who do SEO, we like these new challenges, these new things. So I'm very excited for the first time in I don't know five, six, seven, eight years.

Meredith: 3:27

Wow.

Meredith's husband: 3:28

About what's now happening in SEO, Because for a while it's kind of been.

Meredith: 3:33

Same old, same old.

Meredith's husband: 3:34

I'll say stagnant, like it's been pretty much the same.

Meredith: 3:37

Well look out stagnicity.

Meredith's husband: 3:41

One of the reasons that I am bringing this up now is because number one you have mentioned it to me, so I know that it's out there and also clients, potential clients, come to me as a consultant. They say and literally they have said things just in the last week like well, we don't really need SEO so much, we want AIO and GEO.

Meredith: 4:03

Right.

Meredith's husband: 4:04

And that's absurd to me. But the one of the reasons I kind of shifted to becoming a consultant is because I can just be very honest with these people. Yeah, yeah, like that's absurd to me, but one of the reasons I kind of shifted to becoming a consultant is because I can just be very honest with these people.

Meredith's husband: 4:12

Yeah yeah, Like that's one thing I didn't like about running an agency is, you know, you kind of have to play along to get the business. If other agencies are saying they're doing AIO and I'm just saying no, it's all SEO, people are likely to believe that it's this new thing.

Meredith: 4:28

Of course, because that's what we're trained. We're trained that new is better, because things are only hopefully improving in some ways, and so they want to jump on the new train rather than the old one.

Meredith's husband: 4:43

Right. Well, it's fear of missing out, sort of, yeah. And so also very recently, google has come out and provided guidance on how to get into the results for their AI mode. Okay, this is essential. You can think of this as Google's guide to AIO or GEO, right, geo, okay, so Google has a page and it lists a whole bunch of different things that you can do to improve your odds of getting into those AI search results. It's 95% just SEO. They even link back to the old articles that they had for their normal how to get into the organic results. Now, some things are more important. Now there's a few things that are like oh, this is going to be really. This was important for SEO, it's now going to be really important for the AI results. And there is one brand new thing that never existed before. So I'm going to go through these. I'm going to first. I'm going to begin with the stuff that's old, that is now more important. Oh, okay.

Meredith's husband: 5:45

So the kind of overriding principle, I think, is that every page on your website should be a complete resource in itself. Okay, so people go to a page. You need to craft that page so that they don't need to go visit another page in order to complete the picture, so that they don't need to get full information. Everything needs to be on one page.

Meredith's husband: 6:07

If you think about the way AI results are presented, you know they list different sources. It never lists a website as a source. It lists a web page, takes a web page so it compares a web page from your site to a web page from another site. It doesn't compare everything on your website to another website, it just takes a single page. So let's say your children's photography page as an example. You need to have all the relevant information that somebody would presumably want before they contact you needs to be on that page, okay. Okay, a little bit of information about pricing, a little bit of information about you, some probably testimonials, what's included, etc. Same thing with a blog If you're writing about a particular topic, it needs to answer all the questions about that topic on a single page rather than have other pages.

Meredith: 7:00

Okay, complete capsules.

Meredith's husband: 7:02

So one thing that I'm thinking about doing and testing on my own is like ultra long pages. Okay, so you might have a series of blog posts about something I'm thinking that it's going to perform better in AI results if you combine them all into a single really long page. Now that will create challenge, like I'm just going to test this myself as an SEO practitioner. This is what I'm going to start doing myself.

Meredith: 7:29

Right and get back to us.

Meredith's husband: 7:31

I can't guarantee it's going to work.

Meredith: 7:32

Okay.

Meredith's husband: 7:33

But it's what I'm going to test.

Meredith: 7:34

It's what I'm going to do next. We shouldn't be doing that until we hear from you.

Meredith's husband: 7:38

Right, but that's what let's just make that clear. Don't have seven different blog entries about a topic. Figure out a way to put them all into one, and then that creates a new challenge in how do you make it digestible for users.

Meredith: 7:57

Right.

Meredith's husband: 7:58

So then your headings and your subheadings become important and most likely what you will want to do on a longer page like that is have a sort of what I would think of as almost like a table of contents. At the top List, the hub set, like you know. List what is covered below with you know, by listing subheadings, yeah, bullet points and then hyperlink those bullet points to individual sections on the blog the subheaders.

Meredith's husband: 8:22

Yes, those are called jump links. If you do that, you've probably seen blogs like that that have like a little intro and then it says what's covered in this blog and then has a list of bullet points and those bullet points are hyperlinked down to specific places in that article. Those are called jump links. Ok, that sort of thing is going thing. That's brand new. That's not like anything else is what they call LLMStxt files. What it's like a sitemap? It's like a sitemapxml file. It is for AI bots, like a little directory of your website. So for Google and search engines, you have a sitemap file and the sitemap file is like a little list of all the pages on your website. So for Google and search engines, you have a sitemap file and the sitemap file is like a little list of all the pages on your website. It's a little set of instructions that you give to Google and it essentially says here, google, here are all my pages. This new file is the same thing, but for AI bots, because AI bots cannot read your sitemap file.

Meredith: 9:28

Oh not yet. Do you think they will be able to eventually?

Meredith's husband: 9:32

No, no, I don't actually AI. I'll get to that in a second but AI bots are also not very good, or they're not efficient at crawling a website and putting all those pages together.

Meredith: 9:47

Okay.

Meredith's husband: 9:48

And they don't need to do that. That's not their job, okay, because Google already has an index and what the AI bot is doing is using the search engine's index to figure out all the pages of your website. Ai is not replacing search engines, it's using search engines.

Meredith: 10:07

That's a big, important factor.

Meredith's husband: 10:09

Yes, ai, so let me put that in context a little bit AI, the concept and what it's doing is nothing new, like it's been around for decades and decades.

Meredith: 10:20

AI.

Meredith's husband: 10:21

Yes, the concept. Now, what AI needs to function? Two things, and they are new. So number one it needs a huge library. It needs a big set of data Okay, it needs a whole bunch of data that it can scan, okay. So Google and Bing and other search engines have done that. Now they have created this huge index of like basically the entire internet. So now that's there. The other thing that AI needs to function is speed.

Meredith: 10:46

Yeah.

Meredith's husband: 10:47

And so you may have heard about companies like NVIDIA creating these chips that are really fast for AI. So the computer chips now are way faster than they have been in the past.

Meredith: 10:58

Interesting. So they Are we all gonna have to get new computers.

Meredith's husband: 11:01

No, no, okay, no, these are specifically to power the AI.

Meredith: 11:06

Oh, okay.

Meredith's husband: 11:07

Okay. So the computer chips, like I said, have been getting exponentially faster over the years. They just get faster and faster every year. Now, the reason that AI needs these faster chips in order to work is because a human being can do somewhere between one and three calculations per second. Okay, okay, and these are. When I say calculations, I mean sort of like think about an easy math question. Okay, okay, a human being can do one to three of those per second.

Meredith: 11:37

Okay.

Meredith's husband: 11:38

AI. Can you take a guess at how many AI?

Meredith: 11:41

47 million.

Meredith's husband: 11:43

Not even close Somewhere between 100 trillion and one quadrillion calculations per second. So you see, very fast. So what AI is doing essentially is going out and using Google super, super fast yeah, like 100 trillion times faster than you or I could. So by the time you or I could think of, even start to think about what to type into Google, ai has typed it in and searched and condensed all the results. So speed is the issue, and speed is now possible like it has never been before. So that's why AI is now such a big thing. It's able to be done now. Okay, so if you say to somebody you're working on your SEO and they say to you oh, seo is dead, that is a whole news, and that will probably happen, because again everybody thinks oh, seo is dead, it's now AIO.

Meredith: 12:44

Yep, I have to start all over.

Meredith's husband: 12:46

You can kind of quietly smile to yourself and know that that person is on the wrong track. Or, if you want, if it's a friend of yours and you want to clue them in a little bit, you can say well, how do you suppose AI searches the Internet? Right, okay, it's SEO. This is the next evolution of SEO. Wow, and, like I said, aio and GEO is 95% SEO, with a few more things tacked onto it.

Meredith: 13:12

And are you going to be guiding the few things tacked onto it bits?

Meredith's husband: 13:19

Yes, I have a lesson on that. It covers a whole lot more than we did here. If you want to just do that one extra thing create the llmstxt file you can just Google that or chat GPT it. Ask how to create an llms file for your website. A tip you cannot do it on Squarespace.

Meredith: 13:41

Oh yes, as of this recording.

Meredith's husband: 13:43

I don't think you will be able to.

Meredith: 13:45

Oh really.

Meredith's husband: 13:46

I've been dealing with Squarespace support for over a year now, and whenever I ask them things about anything even slightly similar to that, their response is oh, we don't support third party whatever. Yeah, Okay. So if they do, great, I'm not, I'm not, my fingers are not crossed for it Right, but you can go to chat. You can say how do I do this for my WordPress site and ShowIt? You can not really do it, but I expect there will be a workaround for ShowIt. I do think that they will adjust.

Meredith's husband: 14:18

If you're on WordPress or ShowIt. The link below will also explain in more detail what that other guidance from Google is.

Meredith: 14:25

Fabulous.

Meredith's husband: 14:26

Well, this is very exciting yeah do not freak out when you hear AI is the new thing. It's just the latest change in SEO.

Meredith: 14:35

Okay.

Meredith's husband: 14:35

Which I think like many to come is the one of the most exciting changes in several years.

Meredith: 14:40

That's pretty don't freak out. He says that to me all the time, and it's true.