In a Gold Rush, Sell Pans and Picks
- Stephan Bajaio
- Jul 21
- 25 min read
Stephan Bajaio on the Human-First AI Marketing Podcast with Mike Montague | June 22, 2026 Episode: "The AI Search Gold Rush"
Everyone is rushing to use AI in their marketing, but many are focusing on the wrong goal. In a gold rush, the real winners are not the people searching for gold, but those selling the tools. The same idea applies to who truly benefits from AI.
In this episode, Stephan Bajaio talks with Mike Montague about why human wisdom is the key difference today, how to use AI as a partner for ideas instead of just a content tool, and why focusing on people (your team, your customers, and yourself) matters more than automating everything. If you lead marketing, run a business, or feel overwhelmed by AI hype, this episode is for you.
About the Show
This conversation originally aired on the Human-First AI Marketing Podcast, hosted by Mike Montague, as the episode "The AI Search Gold Rush."
Connect with Mike Montague on LinkedIn.
Watch the Episode
Key Moments
00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
00:52 SEO Gold Rush Returns
02:06 Stop Chasing LLM Rankings
10:33 Own Your Website First
13:07 Pick Winnable Mountains
14:45 Original Expertise Beats AI Slop
21:58 E-E-A-T and Human Authorship
25:26 Future of Web Presence Intelligence
Full Transcript
[00:00:00] Mike Montague: It is another Human First AI Marketing podcast, and I'm your host, Mike Montague at Avenue Nine. You can find us at avenue9.com, where we do all things, uh, human first AI strategy, uh, AI marketing systems and the technology part, or the execution content, and, uh, we wanna create something cool. Wanna make a course, podcast, uh, write a book?
[00:00:29] Mike Montague: We'll figure it out, uh, whatever it takes in order to help you reach your goals. My guest this week is Stephan Bajajo from Vibe Logic, and we're talking all things about the web presence and, uh, AEO, SEO, uh, web design. We're gonna go deep on how people are finding your, your business, and Stephan, I know you have some hot takes for us.
[00:00:52] Mike Montague: So let's start with, uh, judging by the gray in our beards, we saw the- Mm-hmm ... SEO gold rush the first time [00:01:00] around. Um, how, how is it different this time? And I feel like everybody's just resetting to, like, stuffing keywords like we were doing, like, 1996. White
[00:01:09] Stephan Bajaio: writing, white background, but it's a, it's an AI prompt injection this time, right?
[00:01:13] Stephan Bajaio: Like, I lived the conversation today. It's, it's insane. So one, uh... Hey, folks. Uh, first of all, Mike, thanks so much for having me on. Folks, thanks so much for tuning in. I'm really excited to share, uh, some of the reasons I have gray, um, both good- ... and bad. So, um, I've, I've earned these over, uh, 25 plus years, uh, in digital and definitely in SEO, 14 plus, with a lot of enterprise, uh, clients who I've gotten to speak, uh, truth to power to.
[00:01:44] Mike Montague: Mm-hmm.
[00:01:44] Stephan Bajaio: So I'm usually the guy that they call the cool uncle. I'm gonna tell you the stuff that Mom's been trying to get across to you, like, "Do your homework. Eat your vegetables." It's not fun.
[00:01:53] Mike Montague: Yeah.
[00:01:54] Stephan Bajaio: But, uh, cool Uncle Stephan rolls into town and tells you. Somehow it comes across differently, so I hope it [00:02:00] comes across a little differently today.
[00:02:02] Stephan Bajaio: So getting into it, um- Let's see. Right now everyone is obsessed with LLM rankings and- Yeah ... this is not the gold rush. I'm just warning you all. Uh- It's
[00:02:15] Mike Montague: also not a thing. Uh, LLMs
[00:02:17] Stephan Bajaio: don't- No, but- ...
[00:02:18] Mike Montague: create rankings ...
[00:02:18] Stephan Bajaio: right. So, like, first and foremost, what we did, one... Let's step back. SEOs, I love you. You're my industry.
[00:02:27] Stephan Bajaio: I have been, um, I have literally been the evangelist at Conductor and became an evangelist for, like, four or five years just to try to evangelize search within these large companies. Think Visa, AT&T, uh, Uber, you name it.
[00:02:43] Mike Montague: Yeah.
[00:02:43] Stephan Bajaio: All my clients in the past, again, humble brag, but more about the concept of trying to get into big companies that move at the rate of cruise ships, AKA glacial, um, and trying to convince them that, like, search was important, right?
[00:02:58] Stephan Bajaio: So I care a lot about the [00:03:00] SEO industry and frankly, like, I've been doing this for decades. But in saying that, we suck at naming Well, first of all, SEO is a stupid name. It wasn't search engine optimization, right? It was Stephan's employment opportunities. But, like, it was, it was literally, it, it was stupid.
[00:03:19] Stephan Bajaio: Like, we were optimizing content for whatever was going to ingest it, whatever was going to judge it, whatever. And so as much as we can say it was for the search engine, we were doing just as much work for the user, at least if we were doing it right, right?
[00:03:36] Mike Montague: I
[00:03:36] Stephan Bajaio: think so. Right. And if we're... Yeah, if you weren't trying to game the system, right?
[00:03:40] Stephan Bajaio: Which I think is very much Mike's point of his business, and frankly the whole concept of human first AI marketing, or marketing in general, right, is this idea that, you know, if you're not helping people, you're just selling stuff, and not a lot of people wake up in the morning to just sell stuff, and not a lot of people go on the web [00:04:00] to be sold to.
[00:04:01] Stephan Bajaio: Like, when was the last time you got excited about being sold to, Mike?
[00:04:04] Mike Montague: Yo, man, you're preaching, uh, my language here for sure because, 'cause one, I think, like, optimizing for algorithms is dumb if when a, a person sees your ranking number one, clicks on it and then goes, "What are all these keywords stuffed on it?"
[00:04:18] Mike Montague: And they leave and don't buy anything. Yep. You just wasted a ton of time and money and everybody's, uh, time and money, and Google figgle- figured that out pretty quick, and so they aligned their algorithms with human interest, right? They didn't wanna admit it, by the way. So then it just makes- I was,
[00:04:33] Stephan Bajaio: I was fighting
[00:04:33] Stephan Bajaio: humans the first priority. Yeah ... I was fighting. I was yelling, dude, from every rooftop. Mm. I was yelling from rooftops saying click-through actually impacts rankings. What does that mean? It meant that, like, if they were clicking a lot on the second position result- Right ... that, and bouncing from the first position, Google wasn't stupid.
[00:04:52] Stephan Bajaio: They'd recognize that they weren't serving the user well, and they'd make the second one rank better. So to
[00:04:57] Mike Montague: your point- Yeah, so then you go to social media, and the same [00:05:00] thing. Like, people are... I wrote a book, uh, on LinkedIn that was published by LinkedIn themselves because I said, like, "Look, this doesn't scale.
[00:05:07] Mike Montague: If you, if everybody joins 50 groups, adds thousands of contacts and posts seven times a day, everybody's shouting and nobody's listening. Yes. Like, this doesn't make any sense. Oh, and by the way, if you have more than one person in your company, how are you gonna have, like... You know, I worked with companies like Uber that, like, they have thousands of reps around the world.
[00:05:26] Mike Montague: They can't all be social media influencers. Right. So, like, how do you use social media if you're not gonna, like, spam the hell out of everybody? And then AEO comes along, so a- again, I, I'm really looking forward to this conversation today- Yeah ... 'cause we've seen this movie play out before. And so now AI comes as a new tool, and people are like, "Oh, well, how do we use it to spam the hell out of people?"
[00:05:47] Mike Montague: And you're
[00:05:47] Stephan Bajaio: like, "Well." Well, I mean, it's like, it's like, it's like anything, okay? Like, actually, I'm gray enough to tell you a story about back in the day. Mm. Back in the day, there was a time [00:06:00] when a new technology evolved And everyone was clamoring to do something about this technology, and they spent money against it even though people weren't necessarily adopting the technology at that rate.
[00:06:18] Stephan Bajaio: Companies came out of nowhere and got valuations of insane amounts of money that people, all the financial brains were saying, "This is not possible. Your, your revenue can't be this low and your valuation this high. Um, it can't be substantiated." And an entire market was built on this idea. At that time, I was an intern-
[00:06:48] Mike Montague: Mm-hmm
[00:06:48] Stephan Bajaio: as a sophomore and then into junior year of college And I was being billed at hourly rates of 250 to $275 an hour. [00:07:00] I would go back and forth to New York City, and I would bill every hour I could on the train, and every hour. Yeah. Now I wasn't getting that in my pocket. I was getting paid well. Right. But my hourly rate was nowhere near that, right?
[00:07:12] Stephan Bajaio: What I'm talking to you all about right now is '99 into 2000. The image of what I'm seeing is glaringly similar. The market looks the same. The companies look the same. We were building websites before the entire issue of people being scared to put their credit cards online became- Right ... a thing, that then led to trillions of dollars of fake credit card usage being written off by credit card companies.
[00:07:45] Stephan Bajaio: Because the amount of money they would then make, this trillion dollars was inconsequential comparative to the amount of fees they would be able to charge on this new technology.
[00:07:56] Mike Montague: Now, can we pause here- Yeah ... a second? Yeah. Because that was one of the [00:08:00] questions I wanted to ask you today, is that like a- as of the summer of '26 here when we're recording-
[00:08:06] Stephan Bajaio: Right
[00:08:06] Mike Montague: uh, AI bot traffic has officially, according to f- Cloudflare, outpaced, uh, human traffic on the web. And my question is, like, any agents really even got credit cards yet? Like, we're, we're trying to attract agents who are being ranked in these AI engines where nothing is being sold. How does that work? And do you feel like there is value in that?
[00:08:29] Mike Montague: It's backwards. Or is it all fool's gold?
[00:08:31] Stephan Bajaio: It's backwards. It's backwards. It's backwards, okay? Hmm. A bunch of people are gonna sit here, and they're going to work towards the version of the, of AI that is a freaking chatbot. If you really think that is the, quote-unquote, "UX/UI" and version of AI that we've been waiting for, this is not the flying cars.
[00:08:53] Stephan Bajaio: Like-
[00:08:54] Mike Montague: Mm-hmm ...
[00:08:54] Stephan Bajaio: if we are gonna get flying cars, this isn't it. So like, before you go build an entire business [00:09:00] model structure and so forth based on algorithms you don't understand, systems that you don't know, and things that are changing at a rate, trust me, I've worked in algorithms m- most of my life. I've tried not to chase them, but Google sure as hell kept changing them, right?
[00:09:15] Stephan Bajaio: Right. So the reality is you can either chase that, and again, the people that made money during the, the Gold Rush were the guys who sold you the pans and the picks. Most people went after fool's gold and didn't end up making generational wealth, okay? Yeah. So you could try that lotto ticket if you really think that's where it's at.
[00:09:35] Stephan Bajaio: But here's my thing. Even agents are a little bit stupid when you think about it, and we haven't even fully adopted them yet, right? This is the deet, de-de-de-de-de, deet, deet, deet, deet, and for those that are too young to recognize that sound, it's a sound of a dial-up modem. The point in which I'm talking about where I was helping to develop some of the world's first, um, e-commerce brands on the web before people [00:10:00] even had logos to say it's safe to put your credit card, screens loaded slowly.
[00:10:07] Stephan Bajaio: Like, images took a while to load. Line by line, yeah. We're in, we're in that version. You got your internet on a CD-ROM, a technology that you don't even know what I'm talking about, right? It came in the mail. Like, so- ... all I'm saying is, the version you're look- these are not the droids you're looking for.
[00:10:27] Stephan Bajaio: Like, this is not the version of AI that you should be thinking about right now. What you should be doing is taking all of the effort, money, and thought process where you're trying to chase, "Am I gonna show up? Am I gonna show up? Am I gonna show up?" And instead, you should be thinking, "What's in my control?"
[00:10:46] Stephan Bajaio: I control, first and foremost, hopefully my own website, and even that's questionable because if you're at a midsize company or a large company, everyone's getting their fingers in there and out-doing each other and screwing things up, and one side is building a sandcastle, [00:11:00] and the other side's eroding because it's too close to the ocean.
[00:11:02] Stephan Bajaio: And then someone's asking you to judge the success by the number of grains of sand. I've seen that. I've lived that. Right. It's real, right? Okay. So instead, if you were thinking, "Hey- Am I really solving the problems that my customers have? Am I using their language? Is a bullet point on my page actually someone's entire reason for being here?
[00:11:26] Stephan Bajaio: Do I actually deserve to show up? Forget rank, show up. Am I considered one of the most important brands when it comes to topic, topic, topic, solving, solving? I
[00:11:38] Mike Montague: wanna highlight that. Let, let's pause there for a second because I feel like so many people are trying to hack the algorithms to get more than their fair share of visibility, which is like, if you're a small business with 10 employees and you're, you know, have small accounts, you're not gonna outrank a national brand in AI, and you- You shouldn't
[00:11:59] Mike Montague: you shouldn't. [00:12:00] Right? And
[00:12:00] Stephan Bajaio: you, and you honestly- Um- ... you don't even serve that business. So, like, what are you doing? You know? Like, I can't tell you how many times, because I deal with everyone now, right? I, I no longer am in just the enterprise game. So I play with enterprise, but I also play with mid-market, and I also play with SMBs.
[00:12:16] Stephan Bajaio: And it drives me up the wall, right? When an, a, a smaller company that has yet to take their actual expertise and knowledge and use it online tells me, "Well, what about AI?" And I'm like- Right ... "Okay, AI has its place." And I'll give you some examples, guys, 'cause I'm not gonna sit here and wax poetic and not give you insights of things you can act on.
[00:12:39] Stephan Bajaio: But, like, in the meanwhile, you're worried about AI visibility when you haven't even gotten your house cleaned, and we're talking about whether or not you should be inviting people in. And you're saying, "Well, we don't have all the publicity to get all these people in the way we want." Right. No. More isn't necessarily better.
[00:12:57] Stephan Bajaio: Specific and cater to what you [00:13:00] do, I'll take that traffic every day, all day long. If it's a specific user- Yeah ... so here's the big secret, right? Everyone wants their, their photo at the top of Mount Everest. Why? Because it's the highest mountain, right? Okay, here's the problem, and that's all based on vertical feet.
[00:13:17] Stephan Bajaio: Now, if vertical feet's really what you wanna achieve, there are 14 mountains that are about 4,000 feet in Maine The odds of you dying climbing those mountains is very low. The odds of you getting injured climbing those mountains is low. You won't need 50 Sherpas, you won't need six months worth of training, and you won't need at least 75 to $150,000 to do it.
[00:13:40] Stephan Bajaio: Same vertical feet. Yeah. Higher likelihood of success. In fact, more vertical feet than you would get out of the 29,000 feet out of... And, and you'll get a picture on every summit, okay? So what would you rather do?
[00:13:52] Mike Montague: Mm.
[00:13:53] Stephan Bajaio: Climb Everest and risk death, not get your photo because most people don't end up summiting, [00:14:00] weather, the whole thing.
[00:14:01] Stephan Bajaio: Yeah. Right? Okay. Sickness.
[00:14:04] Mike Montague: So- Uh, I think the other thing for me, yeah, I look at it a different way. I kind of, I don't know why I, I look at it like it's, it's concentric circles, but I, I love this analogy you're giving because it's so much better, which is kind of like you get to pick your, your hill to die on here.
[00:14:18] Mike Montague: Well, and you don't have to die. Pick a good one. You
[00:14:19] Stephan Bajaio: don't have to die.
[00:14:20] Mike Montague: Yeah. You don't have to. Like, you know, you don't have to die. My thing is like own, own your house, own your, your website, own your community, own your customers first, own your local market, then you can start to expand out to strangers.
[00:14:34] Mike Montague: Then you can start moving out. But if you, if you try- start trying, by trying to go wide, you're gonna run out of money and time real fast.
[00:14:41] Stephan Bajaio: Well, let's... Secret number one. Okay? So everybody lean in a bit 'cause I'm gonna tell y'all something The future of where this goes is that if we all have the, quote-unquote, "nuclear button" of an easy button to press to produce more content, [00:15:00] one, if you didn't know this, that content doesn't perform.
[00:15:02] Stephan Bajaio: So if you actually, at least not organically, and even in AI, AI-generated content is not gonna perform well in Google, for example. One, they've said so. Two, I've seen it from the graphs. And three, think about it logically. If I put a, honestly, forgive my French, but a piss-poor prompt into ChatGPT, and it cranks out a page for the web, and I put that page up, and then it gets a number one ranking, and then ChatGPT goes back and goes, "Which one are the best ones?"
[00:15:35] Stephan Bajaio: And then goes to Google and searches and takes back that page made with AI, it's a snake eating its own tail.
[00:15:41] Mike Montague: Right.
[00:15:42] Stephan Bajaio: This is not bringing value to anyone, right? So we recognize that, one, that's not happening. So the true secret of what you can be doing here is if we all have an easy button, and we could argue that Mike's gonna create a better prompt than me, so [00:16:00] his could be more complex, and maybe he puts a page worth of prompting in, so it gets really intricate.
[00:16:06] Stephan Bajaio: Okay, at that point, we might diverge, and we might create really different kinds of content. But the reality is that, one, him creating a page worth of prompt is not saving him as much time as you think. He has to put in time and effort. Right.
[00:16:20] Mike Montague: Yeah, he could have just written the page of
[00:16:21] Stephan Bajaio: the blog right then and there.
[00:16:22] Stephan Bajaio: Right. Right. So it's like, that's a little bit of like, okay, why'd we do that if we were just gonna, you know, do it anyway, right? Could have just written the page. But here's the real point It works off the same data, the same training knowledge, the same stuff that everything else is based off of. So its ability to create anything novel and/or, like, truly more valuable than everything else that's out there isn't necessarily there.
[00:16:50] Stephan Bajaio: Now, you know what is more valuable and not necessarily out there? Your knowledge.
[00:16:56] Mike Montague: Yeah. Original thought.
[00:16:57] Stephan Bajaio: It's so weird, Mike. Mike, if you don't mind me [00:17:00] asking, how old are you?
[00:17:01] Mike Montague: I am 46.
[00:17:03] Stephan Bajaio: Awesome. I'm 47.
[00:17:05] Mike Montague: Hm.
[00:17:05] Stephan Bajaio: I've come to terms, and sorry guys, I'm just gonna put it out there, I've forgotten more about leadership, company culture, and marketing than some people probably listening to this podcast.
[00:17:19] Stephan Bajaio: Why have I forgotten it? Time. I have been bad at note-taking. Had I had an AI LLM little, like, thing f- listening to every word I said over the last 14 years, not only would it be tired of my voice, I often am, but, uh, it would also have what I did in Q3 of 2015, and how I helped Uber with this, or how I helped, uh, Travelers with that, or how I helped-
[00:17:46] Mike Montague: Right
[00:17:46] Stephan Bajaio: right? All that strategy is in my brain, and if I don't ever get it down on paper, right, all that knowledge, all that tribal knowledge is lost to my memory.
[00:17:58] Mike Montague: Right.
[00:17:59] Stephan Bajaio: Okay? [00:18:00] So I would argue that if you have your 10,000 hours as a business owner, right, as an expert in your field, which is how we judge expertise, right?
[00:18:09] Stephan Bajaio: 10,000 hours of doing something- Mm-hmm ... you have the blank, you have the gut. So if you have that- You need to find a way to take that information and turn it into something that proves you have it online, something that shows the humanity that you understand the person, not sell to them. But hey, I know I was just talking to someone about roofing, and I was saying- Mm
[00:18:32] Stephan Bajaio: "You know, I'm not an expert roofer, but I'm gonna assume that if someone has, um, has solar panels on their roof, they're gonna have to think about what to do when replacing the roof, right? 'Cause now you gotta take the solar panels off." Which led me to believe, well, shouldn't I actually get in front of people who are thinking about putting solar panels on their roof?
[00:18:51] Stephan Bajaio: If the roof's old, you might wanna put, fix the roof first- Right ... so you don't go through the cost of taking the panels off during a [00:19:00] reroofing. And I'm not a roofer, I know nothing about roofing, right? But I know some expert is gonna tell you, "Yeah, it costs 20% more when we have this. Uh, we have to worry about it.
[00:19:10] Stephan Bajaio: They should bring in an electrician," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all of that is insight that doesn't necessarily live out there. It might. It might, but you know the nuance. You know the questions the buyer asks. You know the, the things that keep them up at night and make them worry.
[00:19:26] Stephan Bajaio: You also know the things you've said that help assuage their fears and make them feel like you have them, and a- as long as you're the kind of company, I wanna be clear here, I'm trying to help the kind of- Yeah ... companies that help people, not actually just swoop in, take money, and get the hell out.
[00:19:42] Mike Montague: Right.
[00:19:42] Mike Montague: Me too. That's my kind. That's why the human first part works on, on several levels, is one, you gotta do the human part. Like you're saying, you gotta live that experience first. You gotta put in your original thought first. Right. Two, you gotta put the customers first, which is a huge part of it. And then three, I think also is, [00:20:00] um, you're talking about the easy button and stuff, is put your employees first.
[00:20:04] Mike Montague: Like, do you wanna- Yes ... use AI to just create cogs, like pay them less and, and get less? Or do you want to make them superheroes, have them produce more and like grow your business with it? Mike, I'm shocked.
[00:20:17] Stephan Bajaio: It's an entirely different Shocked, shocked, shocked. Every day I'm shocked. Every day the internet is ruined for me And you know why?
[00:20:24] Stephan Bajaio: It's 'cause I end up on these websites where the people are the product. Like, we're literally talking now about consultancies- Yeah ... we're talking about people that put their About Us, their board members that are, like, legit, like, real big deals, right? And when you go there, they don't even have a page devoted to each one of them.
[00:20:44] Stephan Bajaio: And if they do have a page, they don't have any of their wisdom written in. So they don't have any articles written by them, they don't have any videos produced by them. Yeah. They don't have any media s- uh, you know, uh,
[00:20:56] Mike Montague: uh- Stephan, you're speaking my language and you're selling it for me, but I came from a [00:21:00] world of radio where, like, the, the morning show hosts on the radio are the biggest deal in the world.
[00:21:04] Mike Montague: Yeah. And if they don't get ratings and they get fired, the next radio hosts are the biggest deal in the world. Yes. "Wait 'til you hear the, the next, you know, Joe and Susie morning show. It's gonna be great." Because the personalities build the radio station, they don't subtract from it. So, like, if you hi- hid those and go, "Oh, don't worry about who's on the radio show.
[00:21:22] Mike Montague: You just, you just love B105 or, or whatever."
[00:21:25] Stephan Bajaio: Right.
[00:21:25] Mike Montague: Um, it doesn't work. Nobody even calls in- No, it doesn't work ... to win a logo.
[00:21:29] Stephan Bajaio: And, and hold on. Like, I wanna also step back. We're not expecting... 'Cause I know there's a bunch of people that are maybe introverts by nature listening to this and going like, "Well, I'm not the cult of personality.
[00:21:40] Stephan Bajaio: I'm not gonna jump onto all the podcasts. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not." Okay, cool. I'm gonna speak directly to you right now. The ones who are more like Mike and I, that's great. Like, by all means, get in front of the camera, do your thing, and repurpose that content five million ways to Sunday, okay? Gary Vee's got a right point, you definitely should be doing that.
[00:21:58] Stephan Bajaio: Uh- [00:22:00] One, let's frame this. Google has already said this for a long time. It's called EAT, E-E-A-T. Okay? It's experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. I have been saying for a while we're moving towards a world of the real ID of authorship, real ID being that, you know, enhanced license that you need to have to get on an airplane.
[00:22:26] Stephan Bajaio: With the AI easy button that we talked about before, we need to know there's a real human behind s- willing to put their name behind it. Okay? Now, does that mean you need to be, uh, with as many gray hairs or have cool lighting in the background? Eh, we could argue, right? Yeah. But in reality There's an entire space of companies no one talks about that died with this AI thing, and it's transcription companies.
[00:22:54] Stephan Bajaio: Yeah. There used to be companies who transcribed it. Nobody talks about them. They're all dead because- I
[00:22:58] Mike Montague: paid them. I was [00:23:00]
[00:23:00] Stephan Bajaio: podcasting- Every single one- Yeah ... every single one of them are built into this solution. Right now, our pod- this podcast we're on, Mike and I, this is going to be transcribed, and that transcription can then get used here, there and the other.
[00:23:13] Stephan Bajaio: One of the things I do, every meeting with my meeting note-taker, I have Fireflies, it's recording. I can go back and use snippets from that, insight from that. Here's some interesting thoughts, guys. Don't just do things vertically, do them horizontally. So follow me on this. You have
[00:23:32] Mike Montague: five employees. Um, I love it.
[00:23:33] Mike Montague: So I mean, that's exactly what I do at Avenue Nine, is if you can't do it for you, I'll help you out. I'll interview your founder- Yes ... your top salesperson, your best clients- Yes ... and like capture those stories for you. Preach. And then I'll turn it into cool stuff that we can put out there.
[00:23:46] Stephan Bajaio: Look, look, look, look, look.
[00:23:47] Stephan Bajaio: What I'd love to
[00:23:47] Mike Montague: ask you-
[00:23:48] Stephan Bajaio: Hold on. Sorry. I gotta do one thing, Mike. Yeah. Just because I was... I, I want to finish this one point. The horizontal version of this, okay? Mike and I work at the same company, let's say. All right? And so do three others. We're [00:24:00] experts on human first. So we set it up so he answers five questions about what is human first marketing, human first leadership, human first...
[00:24:09] Stephan Bajaio: And so we make them varied enough, these five questions, right? He answers those five questions. I answer the same five questions. So do three other employees. Now we can either do interview with Stephan transcribed piece of content, build out of that, or you could do answer one for Mike, Stephan- Right
[00:24:29] Stephan Bajaio: Jessica, Trevor, all across horizontally, and you just got a piece of content that goes this way. So the point is like the data is there for the taking. Yeah. You don't have to be on camera. It can be transcribed. It can literally be brainstorming. It's there for you. You just need to take that wisdom that I talked about and get it down.
[00:24:49] Stephan Bajaio: Now sorry I interrupted you, Mike. Hit me up. What's next?
[00:24:53] Mike Montague: Nope. You nailed it. I love that too. I think not enough, I call it degenerative engineering, not enough people are- Yeah ... are trying [00:25:00] to work backwards from stuff they've already created rather than like create new- Oh my God ... new slop. Um, so, uh, now I think we've been doing an awesome job of talking about strategy.
[00:25:10] Mike Montague: I hope people were following along. But my last question for you is kind of here, like where do you see that going? If we do things right, what happens? How does AI catch up, and how do we get like our fair share of, of- Okay ... visibility and, and web presence from it?
[00:25:26] Stephan Bajaio: So I'm gonna try and hit like three points quickly, 'cause we don't have a ton of time, I'm sure, and I wanna make sure to get these in for us.
[00:25:33] Stephan Bajaio: Yeah. You're absolutely right. Content is languishing right now. Like I had an article that I wrote that was four pages long to try and tell executives why one blog- one writer doesn't equal four blogs a month Instead, I took the concept of what went into writing a blog, took it to Claude, and created a calculator I call the Vibe Check, where you can literally s- [00:26:00] move things.
[00:26:00] Stephan Bajaio: Am I using a subject matter expert in this? How many rounds of reviews are we looking at? How difficult is it to rank for the words we're going after? All this stuff, and it tells you a range of the amount of time we think it'll take to produce the content. Now, how many executives at Salesforce- Yeah ... sat down and read a four-page dissertation of mine about, uh, about how long it takes to produce content?
[00:26:25] Stephan Bajaio: Zero. But if I change that to something they can play with- Nothing ... right, all of a sudden I just empowered them. So go back, and I challenge you to look at all the content you currently have. I am shocked that no one is using AI instead of trying to chase LLM rankings, right, references, citations. Instead of doing that, look at the content you currently have, whether it's internally or externally, what you're sharing with people.
[00:26:54] Stephan Bajaio: How could I turn this into an interactive engagement? Not because it's gonna rank-
[00:26:58] Mike Montague: Love that ...
[00:26:59] Stephan Bajaio: but [00:27:00] because you can share that through every channel possible. Now, why did I make the comment- And number
[00:27:03] Mike Montague: two?
[00:27:04] Stephan Bajaio: Oh, why did I make the comment about agents before, okay? Which is, again, where I think it's going. The keeper of the data wins.
[00:27:12] Stephan Bajaio: Apple has won. Mark my words, Apple won. They didn't get involved with trying to be the ones creating the agents. You know why? Because creating the agents is almost a fool's errand. It's something that if you don't have the dots to connect, your agent isn't powerful. Right now, we're letting agents go and sign in and do all this stuff on their own.
[00:27:34] Stephan Bajaio: Right. This is the Wild West version. As soon as we see legislation and other things coming into play, which is coming, right? You're not going to just be able to let your... You're gonna have companies like, uh, like Stripe, other companies where connectors have to exist, and you have to go through these points, and those are the keepers of the data layer.
[00:27:53] Stephan Bajaio: Apple got smart and said, "No, no, no. If I have all the apps on my OS, your [00:28:00] access to those will be essentially bought through me," right? "I will be the one- Right ... to arbitrate how you access those." They are the true winners in this. So it's not about your ability to connect dots. It's about your ability to have access to the dots.
[00:28:17] Stephan Bajaio: That's where the win- Really smart ... comes in the future. All the cool stuff you want created, which by the way, should not be reactive. Do you think I should go tell an agent to go do something it knows it should do for me? No. Right. When I get in my car tomorrow to drive into New York City, Spotify should know- That I tend to, based on the Weather Channel and its connection to it, when it's raining, maybe it rains tomorrow, um, and I drive to destination, Waze tells it where I'm going.
[00:28:50] Stephan Bajaio: I like to listen to m- driving music mix, and that comes on.
[00:28:55] Mike Montague: Yeah.
[00:28:55] Stephan Bajaio: Right? It knows this. I don't have to tell it. I don't have to train it. I don't have... [00:29:00] That is the invisible layer that will be the quote unquote "assistance of the future," right? That will be the value that Spotify and Waze and others can say, "Sign up for me and sign up for my integrative experience," because when you do, one, they're gonna get a lot more data about you, and two, which they can resell, and two, they're going to be able to quote unquote "make your life easier."
[00:29:26] Stephan Bajaio: Yeah. And you're gonna say, "How did I ever get in my car and decide what playlist when this thing does it automatically for me," right?
[00:29:34] Mike Montague: Yeah. I love that. And was there a number three?
[00:29:37] Stephan Bajaio: Number three What I call web presence intelligence. It's more of the middle. I don't believe that we are going to be focused as much as marketers on channel marketing.
[00:29:49] Stephan Bajaio: Your customer, you're the person who's interpreting this data, right? The, the, the whole concept of SEO has been if s- if demand was there and we [00:30:00] understood it, be supply.
[00:30:02] Mike Montague: Mm.
[00:30:02] Stephan Bajaio: No. If demand is there, understand what shows up, both in the LLMs and in the search engines, and use that information to place smart bets.
[00:30:14] Stephan Bajaio: Those bets may come in the form of social when it comes to, oh, wow, there's a Reddit thread that ranks really well and gets- Yeah ... cited in the LLMs constantly, and I would love to rank for the terms it does, but that's Reddit. So why don't I take my subject matter expert and not sell, but solve in this conversation?
[00:30:31] Stephan Bajaio: That might get associated with my brand. And, oh yeah, guess what? That publisher that shows up next, they have a display opportunity for me to buy out, not based programmatically-
[00:30:41] Mike Montague: Mm ...
[00:30:41] Stephan Bajaio: but literally on the ads that are there that are relevant to the content I know people are consuming. And, oh yeah, there's a writer who's not very well known, and my PR team probably doesn't even know about, but if I take that person and bring it back to them, they're probably gonna be the person next tapped, unless [00:31:00] they're like an editor at that, you know, that publisher, to write the next article about that very specific topic because they have experience with it, and partnership, and, and, and- I
[00:31:10] Mike Montague: like that, and that's the hand-to-hand combat that, like, people aren't willing to do.
[00:31:14] Mike Montague: They're looking for that easy button. But business- But funny part is- ... and sales and marketing- Yeah, that's what- ... have always been built in hand-to-hand combat- Yeah ... one piece at a time, brick by brick, over time. Dude, AI is great for that. Unfortunately, we've run out of time here, Stephan. Oh, shoot. So, uh, Stephan, uh, Bagaiyo from Vibe Logic, vibelogic.com.
[00:31:33] Mike Montague: I want you to check that out. But in the meantime, um, tell us how you can help us or how we can help you with this.
[00:31:39] Stephan Bajaio: Sure. Uh, so if you are a business who needs help with thought leadership, needs help with, uh, visibility, needs help connecting with that audience correctly, and then understanding what that visibility looks like to know where to take action, whether it's before you even put a new business line in place, 'cause we look at the landscape and then tell you where [00:32:00] to get the most, you know, elevation potentially and visibility, or, uh, whether you're just trying to frankly, uh, make a deeper connection with your audience and aren't sure how you can do that, um, we definitely specialize in that, big and small companies, and we love helping people.
[00:32:17] Stephan Bajaio: So, um, please don't sell. I don't need more sales pitches in my LinkedIn inbox. But- Even if you found this enjoyable- Yeah ... um, and just wanna say hi and that you appreciate it. You'd be surprised. Mike,
[00:32:33] Mike Montague: I don't know if you have anything to add. That sounds great. And as far as Avenue Nine goes, um, we'll help you figure out the content, the messaging, the strategy for all of that.
[00:32:40] Mike Montague: Yeah, like Stephan said, you gotta get your house in order and- Oh, yeah ... and get your, uh, your room clean before you invite people over. That's what we help you do. Go to avenue9.com for more information. Until then, uh, l- like, share this episode with somebody that you think needs to hear it, and keep going.
[00:32:56] Mike Montague: Have fun, [00:33:00] everybody
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