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Rajiv Parikh: 0:00

We talked about this notion of AIO, aeo, seo, geo. I've even heard it called LLM IO. So many different ways of saying this topic. So to keyword stuff, this episode. I've said every one and I'll probably keep using it, that way.

Rishi Mallik: 0:14

I think that GEO is a repackaged term to make it easier for people to understand what it actually is, but the game has completely changed.

Eric Nalbone: 0:23

Our biggest perspective is that productive participation in this AI revolution or geo-optimization craze is what we're after.

Rishi Mallik: 0:31

Stuff is changing every day, and so we have some general tactics that have been working. But it's interesting just how quickly it's moving and how quickly even one tactic might change to another.

Eric Nalbone: 0:42

Again, it's one of those things where you can frame it as a challenge, where you know traffic is down, or you can frame it as an opportunity. If revenue is up but traffic is down, isn't that a win?

Rishi Mallik: 0:52

for everyone. And that day when I called you was my second council that month where it was red alert for folk Like they were seeing 30% declines in their actual click-through traffic, and so to maintain that human authenticity in many ways with an AI model can be somewhat easier than trying to maintain authenticity for an SEO page. A lot of SEO was keyword centric and a lot of GEO is actually about the content. We actually changed our head of SEO's title to the head of GEO or head of AI.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:22

Is it GEO or AEO or AIO? What do you call them now? Right now, it of GEO or head of AIO. For this reason, is it GEO or AEO or AIO? What do you call it now?

Rishi Mallik: 1:27

Right now it's GEO. All right today it's GEO.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:36

Welcome to the Spark of Ages podcast. We've got another round table, this time centered on what people are calling GEO, AEO or AIO. In a world where search is rapidly evolving beyond the traditional blue link results, we're diving into the future of how customers find businesses. We'll explore the monumental shift from SEO and discuss what this new era of conversational search means for marketing, strategy and execution. We've got two amazing guests today. We have Rishi Mallik.

Rajiv Parikh: 2:07

Rishi is currently the chief growth officer at Workato, an AI-driven integration platform that automates workflows across enterprises. They are recognized as a Gartner and Forrester leader in the automation space. He is an expert in growth, marketing and go-to-market strategies, known for his ability to drive rapid transformation, and is quickly becoming an expert in democratizing generative AI within organizations. With over a decade at Workato and prior experiences in mobile and consumer internet companies like Qik and Skype, Rishi has been recognized as a 30 under 30 leader. So welcome Rishi, Eric.

Rajiv Parikh: 2:43

Eric Nalbone Eric. We love him. Eric leads client strategy here at position squared. He's worked with top clients on strategy development and scaling growth initiatives, where he's guided advertising campaigns, analytics and measurement best practices, as well as branding and messaging guidance. Before he joined us, Eric worked at companies like GE Energy, eBay, Cabbage, which eventually was acquired by American Express and eventually started his own company. He also holds a degree in economics from Princeton University. So welcome, gentlemen, to the Spark of Ages. Thank you, Thank you very much. Thanks, Rajiv. You may remember Rishi. He was in episode seven back in January 2024. Longtime friend, we love working with Workato. They're a fantastic place. I just came back from the World at Workato event in Vegas, your first big one in Vegas as part of your worldwide tour.

Rishi Mallik: 3:37

That's right, I'm still here. Actually, we're just finishing up. It was a great event. We had over 1,500 people, and thanks for joining us there, rajiv. It's awesome and.

Rajiv Parikh: 3:45

Eric has hired us at multiple firms that he's gone to, so we really appreciate you coming on board at Position Squared. You bring a level of depth, and knowledge and thinking that I think will help transform our clients, so I really appreciate you coming on board.

Eric Nalbone: 3:59

Absolutely Well. I'm glad to be here on the podcast and glad to be here with Position Squared. You know, after a decade on the other side of the table, being on the inside is a new experience and certainly one that we're really excited about.

Rajiv Parikh: 4:10

You certainly get to see how sausage is made, so, but really great to have you on board. And so today we talked about this notion of AIO, aeo, seo, geo. I've even heard it called LLM IO so many different ways of saying this topic. So to keyword stuff, this episode I've said every one and I'll probably keep using it that way.

Rajiv Parikh: 4:31

So my firm at Position Squared, I learned a lot SEO way back in my days at AltaVista. So back then I would go to these events. I was heading marketing and product management and folks would ask me about all these ways that they can be seen in the search engines, all these ways they can cheat, and we would always say to them just do great, great content, it's not that hard. How hard can it be? And of course, it's really hard. Later on, when I started my own firm, we then embarked on SEO as a practice and now, of course, it's changed dramatically. So to start, eric, can you explain to the audience exactly what GEO or AIO is? What makes it different from SEO? Why should they care? So you know, there's companies, there's people with individual digital presidents. It's everyone these days that cares about this. So why does the shift matter?

Eric Nalbone: 5:17

Yeah. So the shift matters because how people consume content continues to evolve right, and since search engines have been a thing, since Google has been a thing and we all decided that we were going to prefer Google over Bing or, you know, maybe Bing over Google in some instances. But since search engines have been a thing, that has been the front door of the internet and that is changing and evolving to the point where the front door, the entry point to the internet, is moving. For the first time in probably 10, 15 years, we're starting to see a shift to platforms like ChatGPT, to platforms like Perplexity, or to seeing integration of AI-driven components into Google and into Microsoft. That's an evolution that isn't new for anyone that's been paying attention to the search space.

Eric Nalbone: 5:59

How people consume content changes as devices change. It changes as platforms change, but what it means is that we need to adapt to how we deliver content changes as devices change. It changes as platforms change, but what it means is that we need to adapt to how we deliver content right, and so if the way that people are going to consume content changes, the way we need to create it needs to change and evolve, and all of us have seen AI become just a massive part of our life, right? I can barely go through the grocery store without asking ChatGPT to help me understand which brand of cheese is preferred. Right, let alone you know how we should fix the cameras for optimizing the podcast or making sure that we've validated and understood workflows in a business context.

Eric Nalbone: 6:33

And so if that's the way that content consumption is going to evolve, we need to move with it. And if we move on the forefront, and if we move with intention and we move with anticipation, we can participate productively. And I think that that's our biggest perspective is that productive participation in this AI revolution or geo-optimization craze is what we're after, right? So how do we participate productively? How do we be a part of how the ecosystem evolves and changes, rather than simply be subject to what happens to us? There's a massive opportunity if we're willing to act, and act quickly.

Rajiv Parikh: 7:04

Totally nailed it. I think it's just this whole shift right. So before, the primary way of being found was through search engines and, to some extent, through social media, was that's how people would find us, so we cared about optimizing for that. Now, with ChatGPT or Claude, or Perplexity, deepseek, people are now asking about us in those places and we need to be found in it, and so that's different and that's what we'll talk about today. So that's a great way of laying it up for us, eric. So Rishi, you called me some time ago and said Rajiv, this is a hot thing. There's companies today that have lost a tremendous amount of traffic, and it's something you care about as part of driving demand for Workato and helping inform those who would look to learn more about them and buy from them. So how do you buy from your firm? How do you specifically apply AEO or GEO principles, such as optimizing for factual accuracy, entity optimization, structured data? How do you ensure that these AI models accurately interpret and summarize Workato's fairly sophisticated automation and AI solutions for global enterprises?

Rishi Mallik: 8:10

Yeah, rajiv, it's a great question. It's interesting, you know, because this stuff is changing every day and so you know we have some general tactics that have been working, but it's interesting just how quickly it's moving and how quickly even one tactic might change to another. But what we found is, you know, I'm part of a number of these CMO councils and that day when I called you was my second council that month where it was red alert for folk Like they were seeing 30% declines in their actual click through traffic, and you know what was happening. In my opinion, it was actually kind of exciting. You know, in the last decade we haven't really seen a change in search up until now, and it was the same old game of trying to win the SEO battle. But in terms of how we apply it is.

Rishi Mallik: 8:54

We were looking at OK, you know, people are going to Google now they're going to Claude, they're going to Perplexity, they're going to ChatGPT the ways that they were searching and the content that these platforms were sort of bringing to the top. They're not necessarily waiting for a click anymore. They're sort of summarizing this information. But what we found, specifically with Google and Gemini, is that it does actually reference the links of the sources that it's getting information from. And when we looked at our keywords that we were trying to rank for, we specifically looked at what those links were that it was referencing and we took the pattern matching there and what we found is that articles that are FAQs, that are list format, articles that are top five, they actually were more often being pulled in from Gemini. So we took a tactic of looking at all of our keywords and looking at the articles that were being pulled and we actually had content on the subject. That was the interesting part. So to your point about it wasn't just good enough anymore to have content, but it's actually how the content was written and what's going on behind the scenes with these LLMs.

Rishi Mallik: 10:07

We'll never know. Every single time the response is different, but there was a pattern in the type of content that it liked, and so then the team went on this battle, essentially for a few weeks, of taking all of our keywords and actually using LLMs to provide content that the LLMs liked. It was very meta in that regard, but we essentially leveraged LLMs, fed it our existing content and then gave it a model content that we thought was specific to that keyword. That was more effective. So, for example, for a certain keyword, we said, hey, rewrite this content in this form of an FAQ. And what it spit out? We put that live and within a week it was picking it up, and so we actually saw that change in our organic traffic as well. But we saw it started to turn around once we put out these new types of articles.

Rajiv Parikh: 10:56

That's pretty cool, I mean it's so you quickly. One of the things I do like about what you do at Workato is you're not just optimizing for SEO in terms of like all the keyword stuffing and sort of fake backlinks.

Rajiv Parikh: 11:08

You're actually creating original content. You guys have videos. You already had things in a form of Q&A and sounds like you refined it even further and then tested and measured it even further, so that's really cool. Here's a question for both of you, as user trust in AI-sided content is still forming and AI models are tasked with constructing the most useful response. So how can brands ensure their content, which is designed for AI interpretation, authentically resonates with human users and prevents the potential from doing more harm than good if machine-predicted relevance doesn't align with human perception? So what are the best practices for maintaining human centricity in this AI world?

Rishi Mallik: 11:50

A lot of it has to do with how we write the content. So, as much as we're actually leveraging LLMs to produce content that we feel the LLMs will pick up, but we do have a review process at the end of the day. So we still have our community councils, we still have our customer advisory boards and we leverage that to run the content by them. So if there was something written a certain way, you know the LLMs are going to put out their interpretation of what we put out there. But we still needed to resonate with customers and we still leverage those channels. I mean, the customer at the end of the day is the one that's going to receive this, so you can't completely take the human out of the loop on this one.

Eric Nalbone: 12:33

I agree, and I think that part of what makes all of the AI models so compelling and so interesting is that they're conversing with us in a human-oriented fashion. So in many ways, they're taking content and they're reformatting in ways that we already talk and we already think. And if you think about who you know that are good communicators and how they articulate ideas and how they present information, they do it in a structured way where they have an idea, they have support for ideas and they draw conclusions based on the information that they've gathered. And that's really what AI models are trying to do. And so to maintain that human authenticity in many ways with an AI model can be somewhat easier than trying to maintain authenticity for an SEO page. And we talked for a long time about writing for search engines and what the balance was of when you're writing for a search engine and you see a page that just scrolls and scrolls, and scrolls and it's how many ways can we say the same thing over and over, focused on a very tight band of keywords? Can we say the same thing over and over, focused on a very tight band of keywords, and 10,000 words later? You know, you're not really sure if humans have learned anything, and you're not even really sure if humans will ever really consume most of that content.

Eric Nalbone: 13:33

In an AI world, we don't need 10,000 words of scroll. We need a couple of frameworks that AI models can interpret right, and when Rishi talks about adapting things into FAQ formats, that's because people ask questions and they want answers. They don't want novels. Novels are a dying art form and I happen to love them, you know, as you can see, but people don't want novels when they're trying to come up with answers to problems. They want solutions and they want them quickly, and so what they need is they need those frameworks, and so it lends itself well to structured communication, and people who can think through that and organizations who can think through that can create content that is human oriented in ways that sometimes it's an opportunity that SEO has taken away from us and we've gotten away from that. That AI offers us the chance to kind of get back to that core communication skill.

Rajiv Parikh: 14:19

Right, it's about that notion of snackable content. It's creating snippets. It's really in ways that we consume chunkable data. That's how we, as humans, work, and so when you're trying to write something for a search engine, you may not hit the mark. Go ahead, rishi.

Rishi Mallik: 14:33

No, I love what Eric said. It's funny. I feel like the old way to market in B2B SaaS was to put out a one pager, put out a white paper, and look at the intent that came from that. And it's funny. You know, I'm the second largest buyer of technology at the company not something to necessarily be proud of, but in terms of building out our marketing stack, we do interact a ton with vendors and I've never looked at a white paper or a one pager. In terms of how I buy and to Eric's point it's you know, how do I get to the point as quickly as possible and that's authentic to me in terms of how I buy and that's what's going to resonate with prospects.

Rajiv Parikh: 15:10

Yeah, and so you mentioned this earlier. So, eric, maybe you can answer this. So Google searches, right, are the ones that end without a click. These are AIO driven or AI overviews, and they've been shown to reduce clicks to websites by 20 to 40%. So now, how are brands redefining the overall value proposition and the tangible ROI of their online presence? Right, everyone gets measured. Right, we all have KPIs in terms of that outcome of search visibility, right? So how do you work with that in this world? So you want to optimize for AIO, but then you're not necessarily going to get reference traffic from that.

Eric Nalbone: 15:44

So I've done this with a number of clients where we have this conversation, and I like to bring up what I call like hey, this is your search is dead graph, right, where I open up Search Console or I open up Google Analytics and I show them. Okay, if you think search is dead, let's just go take a look and let's look through how traffic is showing up on your website, where it's going and what people are doing, and it turns out that search very clearly isn't dead because people don't transact in many, many ways. You're not transacting inside these AI models, right, and so your journey doesn't end in an AI model and your journey doesn't end in chat GPT with most of the things that we're looking at. Right, I'm not researching and having a conversation with chat GPT just for kicks. I'm having a conversation with ChatGPT because the information that I'm going to get out of that helps me solve a problem, and then I go and I complete that transaction, or I solve the problem with the vendor that's going to help me do that, right, and that can be from something as complicated as determining what type of CRM I want to use or the optimal site map organization for a website that I'm developing. Or it can be as simple as I'm walking through the grocery store and I don't know what brand of cheese to buy, right, to just use the trivial example that I referenced earlier. But either one of those, the transaction doesn't happen inside ChatGPT, and so when you look at the traffic that you're still getting, you're getting traffic that's answered a little bit more questions, they've solved a little bit more of their exploratory journey before they hit your website, but they've consumed that content and they've solved their questions before they hit your website.

Eric Nalbone: 17:17

You, as opposed, to proceed with your competitor in an ecosystem that you don't manage directly. And that's fine, right, as long as you stand firm on your value propositions and you believe in your service offering. I'm actually agnostic as to whether you make the decision on ChatGPT or you make the decision while browsing my website. If you make the decision right, and when you talk about how we measure, I think again, it's one of those things where you can frame it as a challenge, where you know traffic is down, or you can frame it as an opportunity. If revenue is up but traffic is down, isn't that a win for everyone, right? And if this is a threat to you as a marketer instead of an opportunity. You're measuring the wrong thing, because if you're measuring company outcomes, then people consuming information and making a decision, that that paints your company in a great light and paints your offering as a solution to problems that people have. That's the outcome that you should measure.

Rajiv Parikh: 18:10

so are you going to shift the way you measure it now? So you're going to say so before you would get data back saying here's my organic result. Right, yeah, now you may get a result from chat, gpd, but specifically ai overviews, they're just not good. They're going to read it and be done with it. How are you going to measure that?

Eric Nalbone: 18:27

Smart marketers have always understood what's kind of an up funnel metric that should be indicative of down funnel success and what is actually a success outcome in and of itself. And so if it turns out that what we need to be measuring are engagements and citations inside AI models, then that's what we'll measure, right. And if clicks turn out to be the wrong metric for a certain type of content, then that's absolutely fine, right. And so we've seen that where I do want to measure click traffic to specific portions of websites for our clients, because those are where transactions occur, and I'm still going to measure clicks on that traffic, there's other sections entirely where I've said I actually don't care about the click traffic anymore. I'm going to substitute and measure impression. And you know, whereas we used to go from impressions to clicks because it's down funnel, now it's not so down funnel anymore. Impressions are the thing. Then where do you get the click? Where do you get the traffic?

Eric Nalbone: 19:19

Maybe this becomes direct traffic now as a measurement instead of inbound traffic that's tagged with Google, and so all of the metrics that we love to look at. You know, we want the most immediate feedback that we can get, but we want things that are predictive and indicative of downstream success. Right, we want things that are going to manifest in the P&L. We want things that are going to manifest with customers, not things that live in Google Search Console. The only person that makes money off of Google Search Console is Google. Right, we make money when customers transact with us and we keep making money when customers solve problems with us and they have success with us.

Eric Nalbone: 19:51

What that measurement means is like let's get smarter about sectioning out our website and understanding hey, this is content that I'm fine with being consumed off of the website. It's there because that's the delivery mechanism to ChatGPT. That's the delivery and how I get this content to quad, so it needs to be on the website. But if it's being seen on chat GPT instead of our website, as long as the decision is the same, that's great.

Rajiv Parikh: 20:14

Rishi is very data-driven right, he lives for data but at the same time, I think you say you love data, decisions informed by data, but you're not so data-driven that you're solely focused on one element versus another. So GEO shifts success metrics from keyword rankings to mentions and citations within AI-generated responses, and that's actually hard to measure because every engine is going to measure it differently, they're going to put weights on different aspects of things and it's going to be personalized. So how is Workato evolving your own internal measurement and iteration frameworks to track the quality and prominence of your brand and content within AI overviews and other generative AI engines, in the absence of these standard tracking mechanisms?

Rishi Mallik: 20:54

Yeah. So we implemented the age-old growth tactic of actually allowing the user to self-report how they heard about us. One thing that we did recently is to actually get to the root of this problem and again it's not a hundred percent, but it's definitely directional which is we still have our typical tracking mechanisms or analytic platforms that tell us the raw click-through data. Obviously, it attributes stuff to direct to Google in ways that may or may not necessarily be as accurate, but then we matched that up with. We just had that simple field of how did you hear about us and we sort of compare what users are actually saying, how they heard about us, versus what the analytics are actually telling us, and what we've found is a lot of that.

Rishi Mallik: 21:36

Direct traffic is now coming from these platforms. People are self-reporting that they're coming from chat, gpt, that they're coming from perplexity, that they're coming from cloudGPT, that they're coming from Perplexity, that they're coming from Cloud and piggybacking on something that Eric said, which is when they're coming from these platforms, they are more informed. So we actually looked at everyone that was self-reported coming from ChatGPT how those converted down the funnel and the conversion rates are actually higher. So they're not just coming in because they heard about us, but they're coming in with a much more informed decision of what they're looking for. That really helped.

Rajiv Parikh: 22:07

You're hitting upon one of the things that we've all been seeing more and more in B2B decision making, where it follows along with consumer decision making that 70 to 80% of people are coming to you even without talking to a salesperson. They're doing their own research, they're figuring their own things out, and so it sounds like you're seeing a measurable difference in that number, even with this general trend.

Rishi Mallik: 22:27

Absolutely.

Rajiv Parikh: 22:28

I'll ask this for both of you and Eric, maybe you want to start. It's like so there's this notion of visible in search equals accessible to AI, right? So now the content that you have, these are the raw materials for synthesized AI responses and, rather than being ranked and clicked, there's a fundamental shift, right. And so how do you redefine this long-term investment for content creation? And I think we've talked about this a lot of times that you move away from single topic data-backed pages to comprehensive content hubs right, that can be synthesized. So how do you think about that in the content lifecycle?

Eric Nalbone: 23:01

Yeah, so exactly what terminology you use, we can split hairs, but the way that I've been helping people understand our strategies are that in an SEO-driven world, we were really focused on keywords, and in an AI-driven world, I want to be focused on topics, and so, from a very tactical perspective, designing an SEO page is about identifying one to two target keywords and three to five supporting keywords and then making sure that we've grabbed them contextually and talked about them in all the different ways that search engines interact with those kind of five to seven keywords, if you will, and then if you want to target another five to seven keywords, you're going to want another page, and then if you want another, you know by the time you want to target 700 keywords, you need 100 pages.

Eric Nalbone: 23:46

I'd rather address a topic in an AI driven world, where each topic has components of it, and what ChatGPT is trying to do is build a framework and understand how do you move through this topic and what pieces are relevant, what dots connect to each other and how do I build an understanding of this problem space so that I can formulate a unique answer to your question. Right, it's not about I want to rank order pages from one to a million, or one to infinity, to rank every page on the internet. With respect to your query, this is I want to understand the topic that you're exploring and I want to go grab bits and pieces and surface them. They're just fundamentally different problems and so we address them differently.

Rajiv Parikh: 24:25

What's an example of that?

Eric Nalbone: 24:27

Yeah. So an example of that would be I'm trying to understand what CRM is best, right, okay. Well, that's a complicated question. What kind of company am I engaging with? Is it a B2B company? Is it a B2C company? What kind of MarTech integrations do I care about and do I care about?

Eric Nalbone: 24:47

And in an SEO driven world, martech integration with the CRM might be one page right, and then that could be Salesforce integration with Google, Then it could be Salesforce integration with LinkedIn, then it could be HubSpot integration with Google, then it could be HubSpot integration with LinkedIn, and those can be four separate pages, versus a hub page or a topical page that is more cognizant of stitching together CRM and advertising platforms. Right, and now a page that talks about stitching together CRMs and advertising platforms. That's not so specifically keyword driven, helps an engine understand that space right. Here are the different blocks that we are working with. Here's how we believe they fit together Essentially, by publishing this content.

Eric Nalbone: 25:21

This is our recommendation to an AI engine that we would suggest that you adopt this framework and that you use this framework when you organize content for your users. Chatgpt isn't building frameworks from thin air. It's looking for frameworks, it's looking for ways to connect dots and if we can suggest that these are the dots and this is how we've connected them. Maybe ChatGPG draws a slightly different picture than I do, but you know we're building the connect the dots picture right.

Rajiv Parikh: 25:49

Rishi, maybe you can illuminate that right. You have iPass, you have the notion of integrations, you have workflows and now you have the notion of agents meant for the enterprise.

Rishi Mallik: 25:58

Absolutely. Yeah, it's. You know, we've made this transition With Roccato.

Rishi Mallik: 26:02

we've built out, you know, sort of the all of Gartner and Forrester have named us for the leader now when it comes to the integration space, so the leader in iPass, and we've had a slew of agentic features that have been a part of that.

Rishi Mallik: 26:17

And you know, with how people are buying today, we have this very modern integration platform, but we really want to talk about a lot of our agents today.

Rishi Mallik: 26:28

It doesn't take away from the integration platform, but that is what people are interested in at the moment and so sort of almost a reframing of us being sort of the new age agentic platform for the enterprise that happens to be built on sort of the leading iPaaS, for the enterprise that happens to be built on sort of the leading iPass, and the way that buyers typically bought in that space is changing.

Rishi Mallik: 26:49

And, to Eric's point, in terms of the framework of how people buy, a lot of our content now is around what the needs of an integration platform are requiring, sort of this agenda capability, and that's one of the things that the LLMs are starting to pick up on. Which is it used to be? Hey, workato is the leading integration platform, and now it's talking about Workato being an agentic platform for the enterprise that happens to be built on the most modern iPaaS, and that change and that shift. You know it's not one web page is not going to get you there. It's having a slew of web pages that repeats that sort of framework and I think the insight is a lot.

Rajiv Parikh: 27:29

It's web pages. They're starting to emphasize video content more and more. I think you guys have a lot of great video content. It's multiple types of content that are stackable as well as enable you to go more in depth, and what you're talking about is a really special instance of this, because the way LLMs are built right, they'll run and build a model, and so that's long-term memory right of how they're built. So then you're coming at it from. Well, we were considered a leading iPaaS company with automation integration capabilities. Now you're moving to the agentic enterprise, and so you have the short-term memory aspect of it, where it's going to different search engines and updating it. So then there's this sort of clash between the two, right? So you have to manage that shift to make sure that you're seen in those engines, because, I would imagine, your users are leading edge, your buyers are leading edge, and it's something that we have to continuously monitor too.

Rishi Mallik: 28:18

It's a big piece of it because there's other content that's going out there, not necessarily competitive, but there's competing frameworks that are potentially being put out there not necessarily competitive, but there's competing frameworks that are potentially being put out there in terms of how people buy. So it's not a one and done sort of piece. We actually changed our head of SEO's title to the head of GEO or head of AIO.

Rajiv Parikh: 28:38

Is it GEO or AEO or AIO? What do you call them now?

Rishi Mallik: 28:41

Right now it's GEO.

Rajiv Parikh: 28:42

All right, today it's GEO A little bit more general, I think, aio, I think you call them now.

Rishi Mallik: 28:44

Right now it's GEO. All right, today it's GEO A little bit more general. I think AIO, I think Google sort of coined the term, and so we try to make it a little bit more general.

Rajiv Parikh: 28:50

It's a good call. At the same time, search is still the go-to for most people. Are you seeing that dramatic shift or are you seeing it more incremental? I know Google reported its revenues recently and search traffic was actually up. Search revenues were actually up. Now I know that's come at the expense of pushing down organic results. Right, it's AIO results or AI generated, then it's sponsored ads, then it's organic. So maybe from a revenue point of view they got a bump, but they also seem to have a traffic bump, so it's not dead. How do you think about it?

Rishi Mallik: 29:21

It's interesting. We're seeing a dramatic shift. So in the self side, we're seeing a huge, dramatic shift. About 20% of our traffic now is being classified as coming from regenerative platforms. But to Eric's point again, a lot of these sort of piggyback on each other If someone found that Ricotta was interesting for something that they were looking for as they were having a conversation with ChatGPT and then they open up a new tab and search something related to that topic in Google.

Rishi Mallik: 29:49

That's where these things sort of play off each other a little bit more. And right now, you know Rajiv, it is a little bit tough to figure out what that user journey is. The thing that we are seeing is there's a dramatic shift in how people are self-reporting that they're finding us, and now are they doing 100% of their research on ChatGPT before they get to us, or 100% of their research on Cloud before they get to us? Or is it a combination of potentially using one of these LLMs to doing a Google search, to potentially going back to these LLMs? That user journey, I think it'll be time until we get a full insight of it, but we are seeing a dramatic shift in that direct content coming to us.

Rajiv Parikh: 30:29

Great, this is really helpful. So here's both of you and I'm going to have Eric start. So, as generative AI continues to evolve its understanding of how it synthesizes and its synthesis of information, how are forward-thinking brands experimenting with advanced applications of schema, internal linking and cross-platform signals so to not only claim but actively reinforce their position as definitive author of truth on specific topics? So it's influencing AI to attribute and amplify their contents preferentially in this crowded digital landscape. And even Rishi you kind of hit upon it saying so many folks are coming in with different frameworks in today's market, especially given how much yours is changing. So think about how are these firms experimenting and getting ahead of each other using these somewhat technical ways of thinking of things?

Eric Nalbone: 31:16

Yeah. So I think that there's a couple of ways to think about it, and the first is that models will use what they have available to them, right, and the things that are most helpful to AI models today are the structured elements of how pages are built. Those are the things that exist that were created, ultimately, with search in mind. Right, google didn't go create markup schemas, or markup schemas were not exclusively created by Google, but they weren't adopted as an SEO framework by accident. They were created with an intent to be used in search engines.

Eric Nalbone: 31:46

As we've moved towards AI, right, and we think about AI as this revolution, since, you know, openai or ChatGPT came out, but it's been in the making for a while.

Eric Nalbone: 31:55

As you think about, you know, the knowledge graph, you know there's been moves in this direction since search has been out there, right, and the technical elements of the page really are easy for engines to consume. Right, schema that says what is this page about, what is it referencing, what topics are associated with it. All of those are gold for AI engines. What changes is that they don't operate off of the same kind of ingested knowledge of the world, and so where Google has a map of all of the internet and how it relates to each other in the form of backlinks, right and it builds authority by knowing that Forbes has a lot of authority and when it writes about you, it passes some of its authority to you. And when you write about someone, you lend some of your authority to them, and it's this whole kind of distributed scheme of authority flowing from people who have it to people who need it.

Rajiv Parikh: 32:48

Yeah, that's how Google has always been built, right. This is a page rank or authoritative links from one to the other. Right, so Wikipedia, yeah.

Eric Nalbone: 32:56

So now flip it for AI, right. And if ChatGPT doesn't have this whole model of every link that exists on the internet because they've crawled the entire internet and built this kind of holistic model of all the backlinks that exist, what is an AI model going to use as its symbol of authority? Well, it's going to start to understand expertise in a different way. It's going to understand that because you relate to, you know, if we think about a healthcare company, because you relate to medical schools, through your connection with individual doctors who have degrees from an institution which you know, definitionally has authority, that type of authority signal, which was helpful in SEO, becomes crucial in geo right, and so we've always talked about backlinks as this thing where you want a lot of things pointing at you. Well, in a geo world, we've talked about the idea of borrowing authority from people, proactively borrowing authority by saying you know, rajiv, you have authority by virtue of your connection with the HBS network. Okay, well, let's call that out, and that's the way that we're going to borrow authority now, with an outbound link right instead of an inbound link, and so you can do that, broadly speaking, right, we want to cite sources, we want to point at high value sources that are outside of our world, in order to pull some of that authority in and start to help AI models understand that we've compiled authority through a variety of sources and so, in some ways, again, it's an opportunity, right, whereas building backlinks is a really, really hard thing to do in SEO land. It's rife with spam. It's rife with, you know, all sorts of low quality players. Borrowing authority where you've already accumulated it for your organization or for an individual is actually wonderful in the geo world.

Eric Nalbone: 34:34

You know we're getting lost in the alphabet soup here, but we love this idea of author of truth, right, and this question of kind of who you should believe. You know, why should you believe me? Well, you should believe me because we have this resume of emulated authority, right, and let's let's show you what that resume looks like and tell you about it, and it's a lot easier for me to tell you than it is for you to research it and find out all the reasons why I should believe it, or for you to just trust that Google has done that for you. So we love that shift and I think it's a great opportunity for people who really do have those credentials and are willing to cite their sources and are willing to say that. You know we've built a strong case here it is you know we've built a strong case here.

Rishi Mallik: 35:11

It is Rishi your thoughts. I think it's spot on. I think we've seen the exact same shift. You know, a lot of what's picked up now has to do with, you know, sort of some of the accolades of the company. And one of the things that we found is, when we release content, even if it's just one link or one piece of content, it's really depending upon how impactful the actual content is versus like how widespread the link is or how many people are referencing it ChatGPT or Cloud or any of these other platforms. They give it a lot more weight, they give it a lot more heft based on what's actually in the content versus oh, does it just mention these keywords? And if we're talking about a specific topic around Riccardo's agentic platform, for example, there are other agentic platforms that are out there.

Rishi Mallik: 35:59

But when we talk about, potentially, some awards that it's won or the number of users that are using the platform or the actual accounts that are using, or actual customers that are using it and their brand recognition, it definitely gives it a lift and it's nice now that these platforms actually have a way of sensing, like the true content versus gaming, the system between by, like how widespread your link is.

Rajiv Parikh: 36:24

Right. So nowadays, g2 may matter more, or Reddit seems to matter more. They have an agreement with ChatGPT, right? So people who are writing about you, but not in a backlinky way, I guess, is the way of putting it. So you're referencing authority as Eric talks them up. At the same time, people are referencing you and it's starting to put those thoughts together about whether you're an authority or not. So we're now going to shift to opinions about GEO versus SEO. The rules of digital visibility are being rewritten and the battle lines are drawn. For years, we've all been playing by the same playbook, which is SEO. We're about to throw down some opinions that'll force you to choose a side about where you think tomorrow's AI answers will lead us. So here we go. Here's number one GEO is just a repackaged buzzword, heavy version of good SEO. The best way to get cited by an AI is to create a high quality, authoritative piece of content with a great user experience, which is what SEO has always been about.

Rishi Mallik: 37:21

Partially agree. I think that GEO is a repackaged term to make it easier for people to understand what it actually is, but the game is completely changed. It's not the same as a lot of SEO was keyword centric and a lot of GEO is actually about the content.

Rajiv Parikh: 37:38

I love it. That's a great response, especially since you just gave your guy the title GEO. So go ahead, Eric.

Eric Nalbone: 37:45

Yeah, I agree. In many ways, geo is a realization of the promise that search has always had but failed to deliver. And this idea of being able to fall back. Geo is a realization of the promise that search has always had but failed to deliver right, and this idea of being able to fall back on content as a source of truth. We've forever heard Google's mantra of just create good content, just create good content, and sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn't right. Google told us that backlinks don't matter anymore, and evidentiary proof shows that they do. We've seen a lot of that kind of gamesmanship in the SEO world and in many ways, ai kind of helps us take the step towards realizing what people have hoped search could be in a way that is really exciting for us. So you know, that partial agreement, I think, is a good place to land on that topic.

Rajiv Parikh: 38:25

So here we go. Here's the next one. The shift to GEO will destroy the open web. When users got their answers directly from an AI without ever clicking on a source, all content creators, especially news sites and bloggers, will lose the traffic and ad revenue they need to survive.

Eric Nalbone: 38:41

Absolutely disagree. I don't think the web is going anywhere. I think that there's absolutely value in having your own content in your own ecosystem. I think the transactions continue to occur between an individual or a company and another company. They're not going to occur between ChatGPT and another company unless it's paying for your monthly subscription. You know and I think that the open web is here to stay.

Rishi Mallik: 39:04

All right, rishi, completely disagree. I think that it's actually made the web a more exciting place. I think it actually gives the underdogs a voice now, even more so, a lot more so than before. You know, these huge companies that had huge marketing budgets before could win the SEO battle inauthentically, and now, if you're an underdog but you have the right content or you have an offering that resonates with folk, you can stand toe to toe now.

Rajiv Parikh: 39:28

Okay, let me push you a little bit. Resonates with folk. You can stand toe to toe now. Okay, Let me push you a little bit. So if I can now go and talk to that wonderful voice that I have on ChatGBT and get really good content from some other source, from various good quality sources, how's that person going to make money if that's all they do is drive that content?

Rishi Mallik: 39:46

They don't need to make money on the first click. Hopefully you can actually leverage these platforms to inform decision-making or whatever behavior through conversation, through conversation with that voice, and then you know when they're ready to transact. They'll come to you if you have an offering that's useful to them. That sounds great.

Rajiv Parikh: 40:05

My team would say, especially if you're a content creator, you're going to have to go to the next level on Substack and pay someone a subscription, all right. The next question SEO professionals who don't emphasize AI content creation are going to go extinct. You can't keep up with the volume and speed of content required to dominate AI-powered search results without using AI as your partner. So this gets to a little bit of originality and using AI to create content.

Rishi Mallik: 40:31

I agree. If you're not playing in the same game or if you're not moving with the times and you're not actually playing, a new hand, that's being dealt. I'm surprised that they're not already extinct.

Eric Nalbone: 40:42

You got to keep up. I agree with the asterisks, which is that we're not there yet in terms of AI generated content being perfect, and we talk a lot about AI hallucinations and we talk a lot about the incorrect conclusions that it draws. So if you completely abandoned your AI content creation or your content creation to AI, you can get yourself in trouble In a world where AI generates content for AI to consume. You know that we just go in a recursive loop. You know what's the saying Turtles all the way down. We don't want to get to that world, so there needs to be oversight, like with anything.

Eric Nalbone: 41:14

I think that if you just set it loose on the world and you say, okay, we'll go, there's actually a site in the financial space which is churning out like dozens of articles per minute, that I was reading a Reddit thread that is just seeing skyrocketing traffic lately and you know it's working for now. And it's working for now and it reminds me of situations that we've seen in SEO, where things work for a little while and then someone realizes that, okay, that's actually not quite what we're going for. We're going to shut that down. So I wouldn't say you can abandon your AI content creation process to AI, but if you're not using it to inform and help accelerate your content creation process, you're missing the boat Awesome.

Rajiv Parikh: 41:49

Yeah, I think the other, you know, with AI created content for AI to consume. We run into originality, right, which is something that folks have an issue with and that's a whole topic in and of itself. But you're going to still have to be original and if an AI engine puts it out, you can't just go out and release a million articles that are just, you know, just BS. Okay, next one Optimizing for GEO is a fool's errand. You can't game a generative AI model the way you can an algorithm. The only reliable strategy is to focus on a strong brand and loyal audience, because AI will eventually favor the most reputable sources, not the most optimized one.

Rishi Mallik: 42:28

I disagree. I think that we're already seeing it with the models where you can put out one piece of disagree. I think that we're already seeing it with the models where you can put out one piece of content. It's not about quantity, it's about quality. We've seen the experience time and time again where we put out one updated article, but the content was of such quality that the generative platforms are picking it up within days. And it's less about gaming, it's more about the quality of the content.

Eric Nalbone: 42:53

I agree with what Rishi explained earlier, where you talk about taking existing content and asking for it to be rewritten and reformatted in a way that's acceptable or attractive to generative models. The same content formatted differently, will be picked up and highlighted differently, and that's not to say that you're gaming it right. And I think that that's where people have always gotten into trouble with search. If you look at search as a game to be won rather than a continual iterative optimization, google's trying to deliver and ChatGPT is trying to deliver the best result for users. We need to align with what their best practices are in order to do that. If we're doing that at a highidelity way, I don't think that's gaming the system, but I think it's moving where it'd be risky skating to where the puck is going.

Rajiv Parikh: 43:36

Yeah, Remember that company Demand Media, where they would pay writers to write about various hot topics and companies would pay for that.

Rajiv Parikh: 43:43

And that lasts for a certain amount of time, but at some point you have to do something of high quality, and so this leads to the next one, which I think is kind of similar to the last one. The only content that will survive the AI revolution is content with strong EEAT signal. Generic, low-value content, no matter how well optimized for AI, will be devalued, proving that quality and authority will still trump all. So EEAT means experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Eric Nalbone: 44:11

I agree and I think that in a world where it's much easier to create content, low value content just gets shuffled to the bottom much faster. I referenced a financial site that's churning out hundreds of articles a day, driven by AI, and they call it out on their site. They say this is generated with AI, it's working for a little while, but it's not going to last for long, and that low quality content will be deprioritized and even AI engines are going to start to realize that, gee, it's a bad thing when I actually pick up on content that I just created. Low quality is going to be penalized and whether it's on the longer cycles from the early days of SEO or it's on fast cycles these days, we'll see low quality content continue to be penalized as well. We should. I don't think anyone wants to consume low value content.

Rajiv Parikh: 44:53

One of my friends, with his analytics company, was generating thousands of pages a month and he's like Rajiv, we're knocking it out with all this AI content. And, yeah, you're right, it works for a little while.

Rishi Mallik: 45:04

And Rajiv, you mentioned it earlier too which is the voice of the authentic, user-generated content, is just as important. Now, with these models, so many responses that you might ask ChatGPT or Cloud or Perplexity. They'll give you sort of what they feel is factual, but then they'll also say, you know, users have said X, or some reviews have said Y. I remember looking up restaurant recommendations and it was comparing cuisines, but then it's also giving reviews right, and so we have to remember that when it comes to content creation, it is you know first. Low quality content is not going to survive. It needs to be high quality content.

Rishi Mallik: 45:41

But then having that content backed up by what your community is saying, what users are saying on other places of web social, so on and so forth, is now just as important to these models as well.

Rajiv Parikh: 45:53

I think that's a great way of putting it. When you think about a movie, right, rotten Tomatoes may rate something really well, and where the experts have a different point of view than the user audience, right, and so you have to help, it has to help you get to a more personalized answer to you, right? I mean, that's the power of Netflix, right? It figures out what. This may be a great movie in terms of Rotten Tomatoes, but it may not be your type of movie.

Rajiv Parikh: 46:16

Same thing for your type of restaurant. So the agents need to give you both. So this leads to this great next question, which I think is it's about the specialist versus generalist world. So GEO will lead to a hyper-specialized internet. Since AI rewards depth and comprehensive coverage on a topic, the only way to be cited is to become an ultimate authority on a specific niche, leaving no room for generalist creators or publications. Agree or disagree, Do I'll?

Eric Nalbone: 46:43

go niche-y or do generalists still do? Okay, I agree, and I think that we'll start to see people get rewarded for talking about what they know, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that I want to talk to the people who are experts at what they do, right? I like talking to smart people about things that they know a lot about. Whether I'm talking to a human or whether I'm talking to a company, I want the right answer and I want it in the level of depth that is of interest and of need to me right now. You know a hyper-specialized internet. It's absolutely going to do that, right. You can create your own GPTs inside ChatGPT, and I've got half a dozen of them that do different things for me and look through content in different ways Absolutely hyper-specialized internet, and I think that that's what we should all be here for.

Rajiv Parikh: 47:20

Is that the end of the Renaissance man?

Eric Nalbone: 47:22

I don't think it's the end of the Renaissance man, but I don't know. I'm a liberal arts guy with a liberal arts background, know, I think that there will always be a place for the Renaissance man. But one of the things that you realize as a Renaissance man is to know when you don't know something, and go ask the expert, for you know the right answer. So I think that that's what there will be is a place for exploration and then a place for specialization. It's awesome.

Rajiv Parikh: 47:46

Thank you, those are great. Go ahead, rishi.

Rishi Mallik: 47:48

I think the generalist or the Renaissance man will need to evolve. It's really interesting with these platforms. I think it's actually teaching us how to be more niche in our searches. So, for example, if you ask any of these platforms a very general question, it will actually give you more information probably than you were looking for. It won't just give you a general answer and walk away. It'll start pointing out little nuances for you to get into your own rabbit hole, which leads to this concept of prompt engineering. I mean, the most basic consumer is becoming an expert in prompt engineering and they're becoming more advanced in how they ask questions, which leads to this rabbit hole of becoming, you know, more niche in our questions and how we ask them. So I think we're going to see this shift of more and more questions and people being more advanced in prompt engineering, which is going to require this shift in terms of the content creator to be a little bit more niche as well.

Rishi Mallik: 48:42

That's great insight.

Rajiv Parikh: 48:43

Yeah, great insight on that. It's like you can ask a general question. It'll ask you to dig into specialized ways, like I can ask it about a particular medical condition I have. I'll actually feed it my test results. It'll give me an answer specific to my situation, like when I tore my Achilles and about PT methods and maybe some things I should supplement with. But then afterwards, as I went along, it would keep asking me what kind of PT plan do I want, what kind of things do I want? It would keep prompting me with more and I could change the subject completely or I could stay with it. But it was smartly built for conversation.

Rishi Mallik: 49:20

You'll see, these days I feel like people are more informed about very niche things. Just, I feel like in the last six months, the conversations I'm having with folk, people are getting into rabbit holes every day. Before, it was when you dove into a rabbit hole. It was a matter of looking at, you know, potentially a documentary or watching a movie on the subject and reading a book on the subject. I mean now, within 30 seconds, you can become an expert on herniated discs, or or, you know, implementing a new framework. I mean, within 30 seconds, you become an expert on the topic and I, at least in my conversations that I'm having with people, I'm just surprised about the things that they know.

Rajiv Parikh: 49:55

I think it's cool because then you end up getting deeper with folks. Either A you get exposed where you can only go so far, or, if you're more open to it, you get into a deeper conversation. I think that's part of that human experience.

Rajiv Parikh: 50:07

Wow that was really interesting to talk about all that's going on with GEO. Now we get the super fun feature of the show called the Spark Tank, so I want to welcome you to our game. Welcome to the Spark Tank. Today, we're joined by Rishi Malik, the Chief Growth Officer at Workato, and Eric Nalbone, chief Strategy Lead here at Position Squared. We're about to test whether our growth experts can spot the difference between the tactics that actually happened and the ones that sound too crazy to be true. Here's how it works. I'll give you three statements about historical marketing tactics from advertising's most manipulative eras. Two of them are absolutely real, the kind of strategies that major companies actually used back then, when regulations were a bit loose and ethics were a bit flexible. One is completely fake but designed to sound just believable enough to mess with your heads. After each round, I'll count down three, two, one, and you'll both reveal your answers simultaneously, ready to find out who really knows their advertising history.

Rishi Mallik: 51:11

Let's go, let's do it Bring it.

Rajiv Parikh: 51:13

Bring it. Two truths and a lie. Historical marketing tactics, enhanced edition. All right, round one. We're going to start with the print to radio revolution of the 20s and 30s. So number one Wheaties became the breakfast of champions by sponsoring individual baseball players at bats with announcements saying quote that home run was sponsored by Wheaties after each hit. Number two Ovaltine created Dakota rings for little orphan Annie listeners, but the secret messages were actually advertisements disguised as spy communications. Number three Listerine invented the term halitosis and funded medical studies to prove it was a serious social disease that required their mouthwash to cure. So you ready? Three, two, one. I see both of you at two. I will be here at two. Yes, okay, the answer is number one the individual at-bat sponsorship's a lie, although I can see why you picked number two. Wheaties did become the breakfast of champions and sponsored sports broadcasts, but they didn't sponsor individual at-bats with real-time commentary.

Rishi Mallik: 52:29

Ah, okay.

Rajiv Parikh: 52:29

That was the trick.

Rishi Mallik: 52:30

That was the trick. I didn't really think they did something around this, but I didn't know it was the players.

Eric Nalbone: 52:34

It seems like it would make complete sense, right, sponsored the at-bats or these days, basketball players run around with logos on their jerseys, or it seems whatever. This touchdown pass sponsored by whatever. I feel like that would be, completely relevant in 2025.

Rajiv Parikh: 52:52

And maybe with online gambling or gaming it could happen. Are Wheaties even still around. Wheaties is still around. It is still the breakfast of champions.

Rishi Mallik: 53:01

Maybe if they had sponsored, then I would have known.

Rajiv Parikh: 53:05

Okay, so Oval Teens Dakota Ring campaign was absolutely real and incredibly successful. I think what may have thrown you guys off was the part about the spy communications.

Eric Nalbone: 53:14

I didn't think that Little Orphan Annie was so popular.

Rajiv Parikh: 53:17

Yeah, this is the 20s and 30s.

Eric Nalbone: 53:19

I acted in that in my middle school play.

Rajiv Parikh: 53:23

What were you?

Eric Nalbone: 53:24

I was Burt Healy, the radio man. Hey, hobo man that song, so I can sing it for you if you want, but no one wants that.

Rajiv Parikh: 53:29

All right, I thought this was genius, that Listerine did genuinely coin halitosis and funded questionable medical research to create demand for their product. One of the first manufactured health scares in advertising. I thought halitosis was a real thing. Apparently it was invented. Okay, round two, here we go. This is radio's golden age, 1940s and 50s. I found these really hard, so here we go. Number one cigarette companies required radio hosts to smoke their brand on air and mention how it quote cleared their throat for better broadcasting. Number two soap companies own the scripts of daytime dramas so completely that characters would pause at a mid-emotional breakdown to discuss laundry detergent. Three Ford Motor Company sponsored news programs but contractually forbade mention of any traffic accidents involving Ford vehicles. So remember, you got to pick which one. The lie is Ready. Three, two, one.

Rishi Mallik: 54:36

Do we have a consensus?

Eric Nalbone: 54:37

Oh, again, I think we're consistent again on two.

Rajiv Parikh: 54:40

Both with two and it's actually three. That's a lie. Number three is the lie. So Ford's new censorship is fake. While car companies did sponsor news, they didn't have explicit contracts censoring accident reports. But that wasn't Iran.

Rishi Mallik: 55:00

It's good to know, especially as we move in this self-driving age.

Eric Nalbone: 55:05

Sounds a little bit like NFL broadcast, just knowing that you're not supposed to criticize the NFL and the league office, but not technically forbidding it. Don't bite the hand that feeds you, type thing.

Rajiv Parikh: 55:17

Yeah, the announcers definitely don't go too hard on some of the play calls yeah.

Rishi Mallik: 55:22

Can we just talk about how the cigarette one was true. That's insane.

Rajiv Parikh: 55:25

It's nuts right. So cigarette companies absolutely required on-air smoking with health claims. It was standard practice.

Eric Nalbone: 55:32

I think that's weird, that that's on radio, right, like, what does smoking sound like on the radio? But you know, if it was television I could see, but I'm not quite sure what that sounds like.

Rajiv Parikh: 55:44

Yeah, they're not clearing their throat. They're like, oh, this is better, so much better for me, yeah. And then the second one, which you both guessed, and you can tell me why you guessed it Soap companies did their own drama scripts and worked product placements into emotional scenes, hence the name Soap Operas.

Eric Nalbone: 56:02

I thought Soap Operas were an element of television.

Rajiv Parikh: 56:06

Yeah, so it was originally a radio thing, so started there. Let's go to round three. This is early television 1950s, 1960s. This is number one Cigarette companies hired doctors to appear in white coats on live TV recommending their brand for throat comfort and better digestion. Number two Breakfast cereal companies paid families to eat their products on live morning shows with hidden cameras capturing authentic family breakfast conversations for later broadcast. Three toy companies created entire Saturday morning cartoon shows that were essentially 30-minute commercials, with the characters and accessories that were in their shows being the products that were sponsored throughout each episode. So number one cigarette companies hiring Dr Sapir and Live Coats talking about kind of a continuation of the previous question. Two is breakfast cereals capturing authentic family breakfast conversations. And three was toy companies marketing their products.

Eric Nalbone: 57:08

What era? Are we in?

Rajiv Parikh: 57:09

We are in the 50s and 60s. Okay, ready Three, two, one.

Eric Nalbone: 57:19

Do we have a consensus? I think both of us have answered two on both questions.

Rajiv Parikh: 57:24

At some point you're going to get one right.

Eric Nalbone: 57:26

I feel like this is the SATs, where you just fill in bubble number C all the way down the page.

Rajiv Parikh: 57:30

Exactly. And guess what?

Eric Nalbone: 57:32

You're both right, all right.

Rishi Mallik: 57:34

There, it is All right.

Rajiv Parikh: 57:34

I love it. I love it. We got the win All right. Why did you choose that?

Rishi Mallik: 57:38

It was the hidden conversations for me. I wasn't sure if that part of it, that recording the hidden conversations seemed.

Eric Nalbone: 57:46

I asked you about the era because I figured the cameras would be too big to hide in your kitchen in the 1950s or 60s. That feels like a very big brother TV era, modern TV era. Ah, I see, I like that. See how you get the camera in there.

Rajiv Parikh: 57:58

Yeah, I think you're right, that would be hard to do, remember, because back then, up until recently, those were incandescent lamps, right, those were big, bright and doing the sound and all that. Yeah, so definitely makes a lot of sense. And you're right, doing an authentic family conversation is not like you could just reel it in. So here's the other ones. Doctors did really endorse cigarettes on TV in white coats. This was incredibly common until the health risks became undeniable. It's sad. Toy companies absolutely created cartoon shows as extended commercials from a later age. You guys might remember He-Man from Mattel Toys, you might remember Transformers, star Wars, right, 70s and 80s kind of helped promote it, but this is actually 50s and 60s, so this was quite a while ago.

Rishi Mallik: 58:42

I remember that was a big deal and I think regulators stopped that now because it was too invasive into kids' brains in terms of what to buy.

Eric Nalbone: 58:52

Absolutely yeah. And they started regulating food too, like what can appear and stuff like that. I think there's regulations around that.

Rajiv Parikh: 58:58

Kind of like Happy Meal with the Toys right.

Eric Nalbone: 59:00

Yeah.

Rajiv Parikh: 59:04

So they did do hidden camera breakfasts, but they were real actors, not a secret family filming. So that makes more sense.

Eric Nalbone: 59:09

I feel like if you recorded my family breakfast growing up, it would be like a lot of grumpy kids complaining about being up early, going to school and like I don't think it would have made for good radio or television. My house it would have been a mess.

Rajiv Parikh: 59:23

My mom used to. Just she would just put out the cereal and we'd go figure it out. I don't need to wake up with you, kids, you guys can get to school on your own, all right, round four this is Madison Avenue Agency Tactics 1960s and 70s. Which mind manipulation technique is the lie Number one? Coca-cola hires psychologists to study how different bottle shapes affected drinking behavior, then redesign their bottles to encourage faster consumption. Two airlines hired motivation researchers to determine that passengers felt safer when stewardesses wore specific shades of blue that subconsciously reminded them of clear skies. And three cigarette companies funded studies we love cigarette companies on subliminal advertising and briefly experimented with flashing their logos for single frames during movie theater previews. So this is the whole subliminal advertising game flashing a frame during movie theater previews. So you guys ready? Three, two, one, give me the lie. Oh, we have dissonance here.

Rishi Mallik: 1:00:35

Oh, we changed it up All right.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:00:36

So I see, eric, you have one finger up, one One and Rishi, you have three. That's right. And guess what the answer is?

Rishi Mallik: 1:00:46

Two.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:00:46

Two.

Eric Nalbone: 1:00:49

We've all guessed two, two, two. Finally, give us two.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:00:53

He didn't go with the pattern. The airline blue uniform was not real and I think the part of it was the specific shades of blue. So Coca-Cola did hire psychologists to study bottle shapes and consumption patterns. This was part of the motivation research craze. So, as you probably know, right on the cans they show the bottle, and so that bottle wasn't just nostalgia. They really worked on it.

Eric Nalbone: 1:01:15

I would have thought the shade of blue thing. You know, it became a Google thing right Like test what shade of blue works on the links, and it's such a popular anecdote from early search that I figured we've been thinking about the shade of blue for a while but you know, that's true, that's true, and there's probably some thought that it would have been safer to feel that way. How did we decide that blue was links? Why not?

Rishi Mallik: 1:01:35

some other color. Every startup now too. I mean well, including us. Actually, we're constantly going blue. Sorry, my brand team would not be happy about that. I think it's some shade of teal.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:01:46

Can you give us the Pantone Rishi Pantone Rishi, pantone 75.

Rishi Mallik: 1:01:51

Going back to the Coke bottle thing, though, coke in the bottle is so much better than Coke in the can, it just tastes magical in the bottle Down.

Eric Nalbone: 1:01:59

Here in Texas they have Mexican Coke which is much more prominent than in other regions of the US, with the real cane sugar which I understand is being distributed more broadly now. But it really is delicious and I'm our dental clients are probably doing cartwheels over, you know, real cane sugar being back in Coke because it's great for them, but it really is something, so we've enjoyed it.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:02:19

That and getting rid of fluoride in water. I mean, our dental clients are super thrilled. But you know I do overpay for Mexican Coke over regular Coke.

Eric Nalbone: 1:02:28

Not an overpay, if it's worth it.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:02:35

That's right. That's right, I feel better, and that's really what it's about. Cigarette companies did do subliminal advertising research and tried to do this notion of putting a frame, even though the effectiveness was questionable at the time.

Eric Nalbone: 1:02:41

So what you're telling us is, if you grew up to be a black hat SEO in like the modern era, you were a cigarette advertiser in prior ages, right, of course?

Rajiv Parikh: 1:02:53

The blue one is airlines were careful about appearance. Specific sky blue safety psychology study did not happen, but it would have been a good one. All right, let's go to the last one. Number five digital dawn. We're both tied at one. This is the tiebreaker, so I don't have to like multiply the scores One of you get it or one of you won't or we're just going to have fun talking about these crazy stories.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:03:12

Number one AOL created fake chat room celebrities or paid employees who would hang out in popular chat rooms and casually mention products they loved. Number two Amazon's original business plan included a feature where they would track which books consumers lingered on but didn't buy, then mail physical catalogs featuring those exact titles. Number three Yahoo paid college students to create fake personal websites with hidden affiliate links, making it look like regular people were recommending those products in their online diaries. So AOL, fake chatroom celebrities. Number two Amazon sending physical catalogs of books you've searched for. Number three Yahoo doing fake personal websites with hidden affiliate links. Ready, three, two, one. I see three for Rishi, and I'm looking at Eric's face. What do you want? Okay, the answer, and the winner is Rishi.

Eric Nalbone: 1:04:19

Yes, I would have sworn that the affiliate one was true. You know, based on a lot of my experience in affiliate marketing, I could see affiliate marketers doing anything.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:04:28

But would David Filo do that? Probably not, but I could see it too.

Eric Nalbone: 1:04:34

I spent too much time working on it.

Rishi Mallik: 1:04:36

The catalog thing makes sense to me. I had a friend that ran a business for auto parts and catalogs were huge for them. I get them in the mail all the time and I feel bad I have to throw them in the recycling. But apparently it's a powerful tool, especially in certain areas of the US. So I could totally see that being part of it. Having participated in AOL chat rooms, I could definitely tell there were definitely people in there that were paid to do something. The last one I was a little bit unsure about, but the other two seemed right, right.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:05:05

So yeah, aol absolutely used fake chat room personalities for marketing. As part of their early community building strategy, amazon did track browsing behavior and experimented with targeted physical mail campaigns based on online behavior. I think that's really clever.

Eric Nalbone: 1:05:19

The precursor to personalization.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:05:20

Yeah, I mean we do throw away most catalogs unless it's personal to us, which is really freaking hard. But Yahoo's fake diary website scheme was fictional. While affiliate marketing was emerging in the late 90s, Yahoo didn't orchestrate fake personal websites with hidden affiliate links.

Eric Nalbone: 1:05:37

I know Good for them.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:05:38

But I could see, you know, eric, I mean people are trying all kinds of stuff.

Eric Nalbone: 1:05:41

I spent a lot of time, too, trying to build affiliate programs out of international countries. You try and go build affiliate programs in Eastern Europe and Russia and you see some really interesting things happen. Build affiliate programs in Eastern Europe and Russia and you see some really interesting things happen. We had a lot of really great experiences and a lot of really great affiliates, but you also found the spam that it's notorious for.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:05:59

I see it's because of that Eastern European Russian experience.

Eric Nalbone: 1:06:02

I don't know what it is about the concentration of spammers, but it's Nigeria for specific types of scams, Eastern Europe for other types of scams. Scammers got the geographic message really well.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:06:13

They're good at it. All right, this was great guys. Obviously, rishi's our winner today. We love having our guest win. We just want you to have fun. All right, here we go. The next section are some personal questions, so I'm going to run through these. Please give me, you know, a short answer for each one. We'll go through them relatively quickly. You guys have done such a great job covering so many topics, so it's great to get more info about who you are and what you care about, because people in the world want to be like you. All right, rishi, what's something you used to be really into that you now find completely baffling about your past self?

Rishi Mallik: 1:06:54

I used to in high school. I used to be really into mixing music, and not the cool kind, so it was not a DJ not working on controllers. This is me sort of tinkering on my computer. What baffles me even more than that is my DJ name. I was DJ Bhima, which I can't believe. I just said that live here.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:07:15

DJ Bhima, were you like the Hulk? I mean, was that how you envisioned yourself?

Rishi Mallik: 1:07:19

I actually just really liked BMWs back in the day oh that Bhima?

Rajiv Parikh: 1:07:23

Okay, that Bhima. I thought you meant the Indian Bhima as the second Pandava.

Rishi Mallik: 1:07:28

That would have been cooler, you know, I wouldn't have been as embarrassed about it. And speaking of AOL, I think that was also my screen name too at some point.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:07:35

so DJ Bhima.

Rishi Mallik: 1:07:37

Yeah, how'd you spell it B-E-A-M-A.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:07:41

Oh, I like that.

Rishi Mallik: 1:07:42

Yo Bima, but it's long gone now that part of my life is over.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:07:48

I love it Sounds very New Hampshire, all right. So, eric, what's a place you've never been to but feel like you'd somehow belong there, and what draws you to it?

Eric Nalbone: 1:07:59

I would go to the geographic center of Alaska as far away from people as I could get and you know I'll deal with the 24 hours of darkness and the 24 hours of daylight, but I could be just beautiful and it'd be probably serene when it wasn't freezing cold. You'd just be in the middle of nowhere.

Eric Nalbone: 1:08:15

I'd pack up and go in a heartbeat so like denali, but with your horses yeah, you know, if we can get them in there might be the only way to get in there on pack horses or something like that Horses.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:08:25

You have your sled dogs.

Eric Nalbone: 1:08:29

Yeah, we get the pictures of the dogs in the background.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:08:31

Hey Rishi, how would you answer that? What's a place that you're drawn to?

Rishi Mallik: 1:08:35

I would also go to a remote spot. Mine would probably have a little bit warmer weather than Alaska. Eric, probably an island and funny story. I actually went to los roques in venezuela years ago and I remember 300 islands off the coast and I remember as an excursion they dropped us off on an island that was completely deserted and as the boat was going away I was like, hey, if they never came back, I don't think I would have any way to contact anyone because there's nobody on this island, which was kind of scary but also refreshing at the same time.

Rishi Mallik: 1:09:09

So I wouldn't mind going back there.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:09:11

It sounds amazing. I don't know if I could do that. I'd have to be around people, so I don't last very long by myself.

Rishi Mallik: 1:09:18

But we're even the center of New York.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:09:21

Maybe that's too many people, but I need to be around some people. It's just a thing for me, but I do enjoy getting out there. When I do go to Bangalore every quarter, I do take the team out to some jungle-like resort or some really unique place as opposed to the cities, so I guess I'm in between you guys. All right, rishi, what's a piece of conventional wisdom that everyone around you accepts but you secretly think might be wrong?

Rishi Mallik: 1:09:47

That breakfast is the most important meal and maybe that's a bad habit for me. I just can't do a big breakfast. I'm actually, you know, just thinking about what I had today and I think I just maybe had some Greek yogurt. But yeah, the the big breakfast thing has has never done it for me. And then it's funny because now, apparently you know, all these like workout plundits are like intermittent fasting. So I've been intermittent fasting all my life, unintentionally.

Eric Nalbone: 1:10:14

I'm with you there. It's a cup of coffee in the morning and you know I'm off to the races and you might see me around lunchtime, but breakfast is usually not my jam.

Rishi Mallik: 1:10:21

Yeah, a cup of coffee is the most important.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:10:23

Yeah, I mean, the whole intermittent fasting thing is all about the notion that it gives your body more time to take the same energy that it would on processing food but working on healing your body right. So there's talks back and forth on it and I've had many debates with my father because of his heart condition about wisdom of it. It's an interesting one. I think the jury's out on it. I don't think there's any true answer, although I did recently personally add breakfast, a small breakfast, to my meal.

Rishi Mallik: 1:10:49

Was it a bowl of Wheaties?

Rajiv Parikh: 1:10:51

Bowl of Wheaties where I would watch baseball and announce particular players. Mine is the Starbucks egg white and turkey bacon breakfast. That's my morning breakfast. All right, Eric, if you could be guaranteed to be really good at one thing you're currently terrible at. What would you choose?

Eric Nalbone: 1:11:08

I'd love to be great at playing football. I've always loved football. It's far and away my favorite sport. I will watch probably every single NFL game that is televised this year, and Red Zone for those that are televised at the same time.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:11:20

Are you really going to watch every one?

Eric Nalbone: 1:11:22

I probably will watch every single game to the extent that Red Zone helps me manage the ones that are on at the same time.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:11:27

But okay, but you're not going to watch all of them. Like that's 30 games, not independently.

Eric Nalbone: 1:11:32

My wife would kill me if I tried to watch everyone independently, but I would try. But I would love to be great at playing football. You know, I was always a small kid and I never really liked the idea of getting hit very hard. But if I was great at it, you know, then maybe that would be a different story.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:11:45

Is it the strategy or the physicality?

Eric Nalbone: 1:11:47

The strategy. I have no interest in pain, but I have no interest in a 300 pound man flattening me, but the strategy of it, I think, is just really fascinating. You know it's such a complicated game that I love.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:11:57

I always dreamt of being a running back, but then I realized that these guys are a lot bigger.

Eric Nalbone: 1:12:01

Yeah, talk about pain.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:12:06

I enjoyed running through people, but that was in touch with Bob. All right, rishi. If you had to describe your personality using only food metaphors, what would you be and why?

Rishi Mallik: 1:12:16

It would make me hungry, sushi, sushi, since I had it last night. It's unassuming. It's raw, it's layered and you get a kick of wasabi at the end I like that.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:12:30

I like that.

Rishi Mallik: 1:12:31

It's got good umami it does have umami you have a roll.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:12:34

It has that, that texture feel. You can get all kinds of flavors in it.

Eric Nalbone: 1:12:38

It's very healthy for you the food metaphor question in my head immediately goes to shrek and donkey talking about the onions and the layers. That's where I go when I think food metaphors.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:12:49

Onion and layers.

Eric Nalbone: 1:12:50

Yeah, you remember that scene from Shrek where you know Donkey is explaining to Shrek or vice versa about how you know he's like an onion and you got to get through the layers.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:12:58

Oh, there you go. All right, eric, what's a piece of technology from your childhood that you genuinely miss and what would you bring back if you could?

Eric Nalbone: 1:13:06

Technology. From my childhood I would go, I think, with. Do you remember the old school gray Game Boys? They were like the size of a brick. I only really had or needed two games. I had Tetris and I had Mario, and as a kid I'd play Tetris endlessly. I'd write my high score down on a sticky note and leave it for my dad stuck on the door when I went to bed, because he'd be home late and my dad would try and beat my score overnight and I'd do it all again the next day. But that Game Boy and I were absolutely inseparable. It's still probably bouncing around somewhere in my parents' house, but I'd love to find it.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:13:36

For me, my era was more playing Galaga, so every now and then I get tempted to buy one of those arcade, the old fashioned arcade style versions of them.

Eric Nalbone: 1:13:44

I feel like I'm worried that if I pick it up, it just like wouldn't live up to the memory. So I may as well just like leave it be. You know, it's like one of those things that you remember from your childhood. That's maybe better than it was, because you're a little smaller, you're a little more naive, but I'll just leave that alone.

Rishi Mallik: 1:14:00

I think I have that Tetris theme song just forever imprinted in my brain then it speeds up and it speeds up and you're like okay, we're in trouble.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:14:14

We're in trouble now I love that all right, rishi, tell me the second thing you love, not the first thing, the second thing.

Rishi Mallik: 1:14:23

Second thing I love I love walking around or running around a new city and exploring it, and the first thing I love is eating my way around the city. My troubles usually revolve around food. You're a foodie, I am a foodie, but no, I think kind of going for walks or runs just around the city, getting lost in it, finding new things, it's definitely a passion.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:14:46

Do you run more or walk more?

Rishi Mallik: 1:14:48

I used to run more until my doctor told me that my knees are getting out. I consider myself a young guy, but I guess not so much anymore. It's just, I guess, running on the pavement. It's rough on your knees, but I love doing it. So they have those cool new treadmills now, though, that have like the screen and you can run through different cities. Yeah, not exactly the same, but I remember using one of those, and it was running around Los Angeles and it was very realistic. They even had the homeless people on the side of the street and I was like OK, I'm in LA.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:15:25

I'm back home. I love those running. Okay, I'm in LA, I'm back home. I know this place you need a little too realistic. I love those running machines too. I like that feeling of being somewhere as opposed to just being on the treadmill, and I like when they vary the hills and all that. That's super fun.

Eric Nalbone: 1:15:37

I was a rower in a past life, so for me it's not a treadmill, it's the ergometers, the rowing machines and love-hate relationship like people have with treadmills. Have you rode on the charles? Yeah, I crashed on the charles. Actually I, in the head of the charles, I I crashed the princeton men's eight into the harvard or no, into the cal men's eight ahead of us, oh jeez. And I single-handedly prevented the cal coach from winning his first race. As the coach, old princeton guy who took the cal job and I crashed ahead of the charles that year into their boat and the stroke seat. Who's a massive German guy in the cow boat just shakes his head and looks at me and he goes oh Princeton, what have you done? Sorry, dude. So that was the last time I was on the Charles crashing.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:16:17

Was that your last row on the Charles? They never let you.

Eric Nalbone: 1:16:20

Yeah, that was the last time we rode on the Charles. That was my senior year of college and we didn't go up to Boston. That year they came to us. But yeah, that was the last time I was on the Charles.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:16:32

All right. Well, you know what we'll all have to do at some point is you know? We all have a common friend, sean Jacobson, that likes to do his marathon walks through San Francisco, so we'll have to do one of those. I've done one. Instead of 26, we did 29 miles and it's a great experience. Cold on the day that I did it, it was cold and rainy, but it was an amazing experience. Great way to hang out with people.

Eric Nalbone: 1:16:49

That sounds awesome. 29 miles, that's a heck of a walk.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:16:53

Tough. It was a tough one, but it was enjoyable. So, anyways, I thank you guys. Today we covered a really interesting topic that's super top of mind today with AEO, geo, seo, and then I love how we can take ourselves through marketing history and get ourselves to chat a little more about who we're about and what we're up to. So thank you so much for being here today.

Rishi Mallik: 1:17:12

Thanks, rajiv had a blast. Thanks for having us.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:17:20

That was a great conversation. I enjoy learning so much from our own team member, eric, who has so many incredible experiences, as well as Rishi, who really thinks about these sorts of things deeply as part of driving results for his company, as well as all the different companies he advises. So this session was all about talking about thinking about this whole new move towards AEO, or AI engine optimization, and I think it's important to put that into context. When you're designing your content and how people will see it, you want to think about it in these four ways. First, when they come to your website or various touch points, how does a human see it? What is a human experience? Second, think about it from a search engine perspective. How do you set up the technical infrastructure and the content such that the search engines can easily find you and run its magic? Then you want to think about the different weights and measures that an AI engine, like a cloud or a chat, gpt or perplexity, will look at your site. And then, fourth, start thinking about agents. And so imagine agents who are looking. A buying agent or an RFP agent will come to your site. How does it need to communicate with you? So these notions of the MCP and how do agents communicate with other agents will be another way to structure your content. So if you think about it from that perspective, at least have the strategic outpost for those, you'll be able to go far.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:18:53

So now, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today's podcast, please take a moment to rate it and comment. It makes a huge difference to us. You can find us on Apple, spotify, youtube and everywhere podcasts can be found. The show is produced by Sunleep Parikh and Anand Shah, production assistance by Taryn Talley, edited by Lorne Ballant. I'm your host, rajiv Parikh, from Position Squared, an AI-centric growth marketing company based in Silicon Valley. Come visit us at position2.com.

Rajiv Parikh: 1:19:22

This has been an FNFunny production. They do a fantastic job in putting these together. We'll catch you next time. And remember folks be ever curious.