Can Your Business Be Found on ChatGPT?
As traditional search engines fade, a bunch of startups say they are helping businesses figure out what to do now.
Good Morning!
Here are today’s highlights:
Entrepreneurs are finding opportunities in hybrid laundromats and value-priced office space.
Gene Marks says CEOs who claim AI is allowing them to fire workers are just covering up for bad management.
Prestige credit cards are finding that the more they charge, the more business they get.
A family-owned toy maker sued President Trump and won. So far, it hasn’t helped.
MARKETING
A new crop of startups claims to help businesses get discovered by AI bots: “For many businesses, Google used to be core to their strategy to get in front of potential customers. They'd use search engine optimization tactics to make sure they're one of the treasured few links that show up when you search for something. Those days are numbered, thanks to AI. Search traffic for businesses like travel site Kayak and edtech company Chegg is dropping, in part because 60 percent of searches on sites like Google aren't leading people to click any links, per one study — they just read the AI summary at the top. An executive at a cybersecurity company told Forbes search traffic to its website has gone down 10 percent this year: ‘The industry is really turned on its head.”
“Now, instead of ginning up content to rank higher in traditional search engines, businesses are increasingly trying to grok how their brands show up in answers generated by AI search engines like Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT, and create new content designed to be picked up by bots — and a new crop of startups has sprung up to help them.”
“Profound generates thousands of synthetic prompts like ‘cheap football cleats’ or ‘best phone for a teenager’ and sends them to AI search engines to get an overall idea of which brands most frequently come up in different responses. The software is plugged into the brand’s website to observe, in real time, which specific pages are being crawled the most.”
“Profound then tracks ‘sentiment’ to gauge a brand’s reputation within AI search by capturing phrases that could have negative connotations. Based on these metrics, it makes recommendations (as a traditional marketing agency would) like suggesting keywords, formatting style and layout and adding metadata to make pages easier to scrape by AI search engines. In some cases, it’s also using AI models to generate content that’s custom made to be crawled by AI search engines.” READ MORE
