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Stop Chasing Fool's Gold

Stephan Bajaio on Marketing and AI for SME Growth with Jeremy Yang | June 18, 2026

Companies are spending a lot to improve their LLM rankings, but most of that effort is wasted. The technology is still too new to rank results like a search engine, and it doesn't sort by confidence. In the end, the people making real money are those selling the tools.


In this episode, Stephan Bajaio talks with Jeremy Yang about why the top answer from an AI can be completely wrong, how measurement has become so scattered that chasing attribution is a mistake, and why you should focus on the one thing you can control: your content. If you work in marketing, run a small business, or need to show results for every dollar spent, this episode is for you.

About the Show

This conversation originally aired on Marketing and AI for SME Growth, hosted by Jeremy Yang of Digital Goliath.


Connect with Jeremy Yang on LinkedIn.

Watch the Episode


Key Moments

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro

00:37 Stephan’s SEO Journey

02:21 Why LLM Rankings Mislead

08:07 PPC vs SEO Fundamentals

14:01 Attribution Myths and Audience Experience

24:49 AI for Content Repurposing

25:15 Turning PDFs into Tools

28:24 Why AI Content Fails SEO

31:49 Web Presence Intelligence

38:23 Maturity Assessments and Roadmaps

41:00 Build Buy Borrow Strategy

42:50 How to Work Together

43:07 Where to Find Stephan

44:21 Share Feedback and Support

45:41 Final Thanks and Wrap

Full Transcript

Jeremy: [00:00:00] all right, guys, thanks for coming back to another episode. Uh, I'm with Stephan Bajario. So I wanna make sure I don't butcher that name, 'cause I've been listening to it

the whole, whole 

Stephan: a not an easy one. I, I appreciate Jeremy, you

Jeremy: No worries, man.

Stephan: You get extra points

Jeremy: know... No, I love it. And I know that, um, uh, how deep a street cred that you have, and I'm not gonna do it justice. I know that you're the co-founder of Conductor. I know you've worked big and small. And, um, about two years ago, I think you started Vibe Logic

Stephan: I did

Jeremy: the other half, uh, Trevor.

And, uh, it's been, that's been going great. I'm gonna let you introduce yourself for, for the, uh, to, to establish the street cred, man

Stephan: Sure. Well, uh, thanks so much for having me, Jeremy. Uh, appreciate it. I know there's a lot of folks probably watching and listening on the other side of the world, so I super appreciate that as well. But wherever you are, uh, I'm excited to share whatever wisdom I've achieved in the last 25 years. Yeah, I am that old.

Um, so I'm Stephan Bajayo. I was-- I'm former, [00:01:00] uh, well, I'm still technically a co-founder of, uh, of Conductor, which is, uh, one of the, the world's leading enterprise SEO platform. Um, you know, we were bought by WeWork, if you know that brand. We bought ourselves back from WeWork before they imploded. Uh, and we worked with the world's largest brands, uh, helping them with SEO and understanding essentially how they should deploy search within their own companies.

Software company, obviously, but I built a 65-person global SEO team inside of that, so kinda like an agency. Then I decided I'd go figure out how the other half lived after we were valued at about half a billion dollars. Uh, I went, did a CMO stint for about a year and a half in a completely different industry.

Again, like I said, I got to be on the other side of the table and build a team from, you know, very little to 12 people, all of whom were individual contributors kind of bringing their own, uh, expertise to the table. [00:02:00] And then finally, uh, about two years ago, like you said, I started Vibe Logic. Uh, it's been interesting.

I bootstrapped it. There's no VC money. There's nobody here to save me. Uh, but you know, I've been having a blast and helping companies large and small, everything in between. So really excited to talk about some of that today.

Jeremy: Yeah, for sure. Definitely, man. Um, last time when we done that pre-interview, one of the first things you got into is you think you feel like, and this is your core premise, that a lot of the SMEs are chasing fool's gold when they're looking for what they call LLM rankings,

Stephan: Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't even blame the SMEs, I'd blame the executives. Um, and, and I-- listen, I'm, I'm-- I consider myself an executive. Maybe I'm a little less of an ivory tower executive when I talk about things, I like to get in the mud and figure it out. Um, I'll say this: I think that right now, the technology that we are chasing, which is LLMs, is [00:03:00] too early in its state to be defining what you're really going after.

So if you think of a search engine, right? Okay. The search engine by nature is supposed to go from most relevant to least relevant, and you know that what's out on the bottom of page one is not supposed to be as relevant, we believe, as what's top of page one. That's why top of page one gets more clicks.

That's also why advertising dollars, and that's the entire premise of Google's, you know, finances, is to put these ads, right, uh, in the places that would get the most clicks. The reality, though, is that that is not what happens inside of an LLM. An LLM is not giving you a list from highest to lowest priority.

Not just that, we are so early in the adoption stage of this technology that we're still seeing hallucinations and other things that are changing and, you know, it's not hallucination by highest confidence to lowest confidence. It's not like saying the bottom of the page, you know you're gonna have less confidence [00:04:00] clicking on something it suggests at the bottom versus the top.

Doesn't work that way. So it literally could be suggesting something at the top of the page that's kind of erroneous, and you're never gonna know it because it does the, it has the best poker face of anything out

there 

Jeremy: I never thought about it like that. 'Cause I, I, like you think the relevance and you think about the, like the erroneous part, right? Like the confidence.

Stephan: Yeah.

Jeremy: They never thought about that. 'Cause you think, well, that's probably what they most confident in, that's why they put up the top. But that's not the... You're saying that's not the case at all.

Stephan: No. And the problem is that they don't give you a confidence score. If they would give you a confidence score, we feel this is eighty-five percent accurate. Okay, you know what you're working with versus this is equivalent to the flip of a coin versus there's not a lot of content out there about this topic, so we're not gonna act like we have the answer.

We're gonna tell you that this is like a twenty percent chance that this is correct. At least the user now doesn't have to think, "Oh," you know, blindly, like, [00:05:00] "Whatever LLM say must be right." The same way, by the way, that people used to think until they got smart about it. Do you guys remember, think back to the beginning of Google and stuff, if you were old enough to be around for that?

People thought it was like God. Whatever Google says is number one must be the best of what it is. Here's the thing, the best oncologist doesn't necessarily have the greatest rate of curing cancer. So, like, just 'cause their website showed up number one, and people had to learn that. We haven't even gotten to the point where the average individual is using an LLM effectively yet to even think about that.

And by the way, that's all gonna get disrupted 

Jeremy: Yeah 

Stephan: by not agents, but assistants. So when Siri really becomes what it's supposed to be, underpinned by Gemini, you're gonna see that the way people are gonna think about their AI is not a chatbot. They're gonna be asking for it to do things and hopefully be predictive in how it [00:06:00] helps.

At the end of the day, and why I think you don't chase the LLM's "rankings" quote unquote,

Jeremy: Mm-hmm.

Stephan: is because all that is, is an interpretation of your data.

Jeremy: Yeah

Stephan: you don't focus on your data first, what you're saying to the rest of the world, whether you've gone deep enough into a topic, whether or not you're actually controlling.

If you can't get that right, which was what SEO was all about anyway, right? If you couldn't have the pages, if you didn't have the content, then how were you expecting to rank for it? Well, here it's taking words and stuff from your stuff, as well as from the rest of the web. We can talk about what the rest of the web means a little bit later.

That is the fundamental. So instead of spending money, and there's a ridiculous amount of money trying to chase this gold, which by the way, the only people making the money really are gonna be the guys that sell you the pans and the picks. Those are the guys that'll make tons of money in this, in this game, because that's gonna keep changing, and have you noticed how fast it's changing?

Jeremy: Yeah. E- every two month. E- every... Well, [00:07:00] like, like we spoke three weeks ago, things already changed,

Stephan: Anthropic just said today, just said today, the head of Anthropic said we should hit a break. We should all have a non-proliferation clause on AI right now because it's starting to do things it's not supposed to do, and we may wanna hit a brake pedal on this. Now, this is a trillion-dollar company that's telling us this.

Now, I don't wanna conflagrate things, I'm just saying if that really had a huge-- Let's assume that the governments of the world listen to that, and all of a sudden they're like, "Oh God, we gotta get together," and they put a summit together really fast, and they make some decisions, and they change everything. You just went and banked on all that stuff, and now it changes again under-- from under you. All I'm saying is the thing you can control the most is your content. And nine times out of ten, if I come look at your website, and we talk about your business, you're probably not going deep enough or wide enough on certain things [00:08:00] in order to really validate that you are what you say you are, let alone using the customer's language.

Jeremy: Got, got you. So my, my thing with SEO, 'cause I'm in PPC, right? And, and you're an SEO expert, and you, you've been SEO for a long time, and you've worked with massive businesses that came to the office and done work, right? My thing with SEO versus PPC is always like PPC is they will give you as much instructions as they can.

They'll try to review as much data. SEO, always a little bit of mystery. There's always updates. So you kind of know this game. You know that, you know, things are gonna change and you better do things on a fundamental level, right?

Stephan: Yeah, I think you have to look and, and we kinda talked about this before, but I think you, you need to see, um... So PPC is the day trading and, and, uh, and the retirement fund is SEO. Um, right? We have to think of them in that way, but they're all stocks, right? So the beautiful part about PPC is we can turn on the [00:09:00] faucet

Jeremy: Yeah.

Stephan: Get people to the page that we've built quickly before we even hope it's ranking in Google, and understand whether it converts, what people do, all the kind of...

You, you can get your target audience there and understand it better. Now, it's probably not gonna be affordable for you to do that forever, right? Because most people don't retire on their day trading account. Doesn't mean you don't day trade, or it doesn't mean you don't trade. It just means they both have their own place in your financial life.

So where I look at it is there's this symbiotic relationship between the two

Jeremy: Mm-hmm.

Stephan: where you can get tremendous learnings. Now, the nice part about PPC also is you don't have to worry usually about someone creating the content. You need a landing page, but if the content exists already, cool. You're kind of at their mercy of whether or not that page converts, so, like, the CRO of the page matters to you just like it matters to me as the SEO.

But [00:10:00] in reality, if the devs don't come fix things for me, speed and other things, I'm kinda screwed. So SEO is by nature, um... It's funny, we used to think that SEO was all about optimizing the pages. I actually see FCO as optimizing the business. And the reason I say that is because an SEO has to try to convince content writers to go along for the ride, get dev to take their tickets and actually do something, even though half the tickets should be things they could change themselves.

They have to hope that marketing is gonna come along for the ride, brand marketing, and allow them to go after certain things. "Oh no, we're not allowed to use that term. Oh, we don't like that. That's not brand appropriate," blah, blah, blah. Okay, cool, but the audience is actually looking for it this way. And then, uh, and then product is coming from another direction and naming things and being like, "Oh, SEO this for me," right?

Not as much what paid is gonna run into. So

Jeremy: Yep.

Stephan: this is a, this is a problem that's, [00:11:00] depending on the size of your company and, and what you're trying to accomplish, whether it's B2B, B2C and all that, um, this is something I have seen on repeat over and over again, so much so that a conductor at one point, I decided to take on a role called chief evangelist, which my mom didn't understand.

She was like, "Are you becoming religious?" And I'm like, "No, I promise my job is just to show people what would be good for them that they don't realize that's sitting under their nose." And that was like, I would come into big companies, Fortune 500, internet retailer 1000s, and I was the one tapped to go in front of the C-suite or the chief marketing officers and say things to them they wouldn't hear from anyone else

Jeremy: A- and to tie it all together, right? To, to tie all these, uh, things together, yeah. Yeah

Stephan: and I'm not really one-- I, I mean, like, one of my favorite conversations, I'm sitting across from a, a, a very impressive CMO with tremendous background, and he challenges me. He says, "Well, we've [00:12:00] been with Conductus for six months now," and I'm not... You know, he's new to the business, but he's-- I'm not...

You know, the way it always works, right? CMO comes in, wants to change everything.

Jeremy: White

Stephan: comes in and goes, "Well, what's really happening here?" Now, I have a problem. My account management team has told me we're up against the fact that we've been giving recommendations to these guys, and they're not fulfilling them.

So basically, what I have to tell him is, "John, I am trying so much to get you to your numbers and get you to the right place. However, if Larry Page were to call me up right now, whisper three sweet nothings in my ear," one of the founders of Google, by the way, for those who don't know,

Jeremy: Hmm,

Stephan: "and tell me the secrets to the algorithm, and if I was just to, like, type a few things onto your website, you would rank number one for every term you ever wanted, and you could dance in the boardroom. [00:13:00] How great would that be?" It'd be amazing, right? Here's the thing. Even if I had that, in the current situation we're in today, it would be 100% impossible because your system would not allow for me to type the right things. Now, I don't-- Larry Page doesn't have my number. There are no secrets to the algorithm, and the reality is we've gotta try and fail, but I can't get any of those at-bat, so to speak, because the content team's not going along for the ride, and the dev team's not going along for the ride.

So why don't we get the CTO in here and start talking about what's the obstacles? Because again, I could be 100% right, and we're never gonna know because we can't get opportunities, right? Which wasn't a knock on anyone, but it was only to say, like, the system isn't built for success. Even if you come with all the expertise in the world, it won't matter 'cause you're not s- you're not prepared to do the things we need you to do.

Jeremy: Yeah. So, so [00:14:00] that brings up a really good point. Like, that's, that's actually my second point I wanted to hit was that, um, I think w- those type of communication with marketing managers, and we're talking about measurement, and I think that they've evolved to a point where they understand how fragmented measurement is and how Google is grabbing their own attribution and Facebook's grabbing their own attribution, and everyone's claiming that bit of remarketing in their thing, so it actually becomes, the number becomes inflated.

So they're thinking about, well, I, I understand all that, but I still need a number to show my boss where the channels has to be invested, right? They only got so much marketing budget, and it's whoever can tell the better story. However, in your eyes and how, what you guys are putting together, that's not the case.

Like, you don't want them to think about that. You want them to think about,

Stephan: Yeah, it's weird. I, I'm not saying numbers don't matter, but I am saying that content matters in order to get to numbers.

Jeremy: Mm-hmm.

Stephan: And content shouldn't be seen as written content or, you know, [00:15:00] video or... Like it's, it's literally the value proposition you're providing. So if you have a good value proposition that should connect if you were to get it in front of the right people, if you really do offer a good product, you really do offer a good solution, you really are, you know.

And again, there's a deservedness to that. You can't just say, "Oh, well, you know, I'm a crappy business, but I show up and rank."

Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah, yeah

Stephan: it's not gonna-- That's not really what we're talking about here. We're talking about if you really deserve it, and the true business problem you have right now is not getting in front of the audience you need to get in front of.

You need to convert what you're doing into value before it's selling. Meaning people want to be solved to, not sold to. No one got up and got on the internet today for someone else to sell them shit. No one. Right? Sorry

Jeremy: for solve. Look- looking to solve the, the problem, right? That's what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah

Stephan: people express their needs, whether that's in an LLM, a search bar, uh, Reddit, anywhere they go, [00:16:00] right?

They have an intention for finding solutions, finding information, finding answers, sometimes finding product, finding all that stuff, right? But there's more selection now than there ever has been in history. We agree?

Jeremy: Yeah, and you said that people do more research as well now.

Stephan: but there's also more data to sort through, right? AI has made that horrendous, right?

Because all of a sudden you have, like, the easy button people press to produce, honestly, forgive my French, bullshit content that is really weak and thin, and you have to sort through that. And if you don't know the difference, it looks kind of right, but it's not. And sometimes you need an expert to know the difference there, and that's why executives accept a 40-page dissertation on something and say, "Great work," and they don't even know really where that comes from.

But the point I'm getting at is numbers matter. They still matter. But every one of these people that would report to me as a CMO were all trying to [00:17:00] jockey for why their channel was the best.

Jeremy: Yes

Stephan: They weren't jockeying for making sure that the audience was being made aware of the value proposition they needed.

They all were trying to claim the dollar at the end of the day, but that's not how it works. Last click attribution is a f- is just... It's a fallacy of an attribution model because it's just the last thing in a long road of what someone did. If you look at Google's seven, um, seven-eleven-four rule, it's, uh, you have to have seven hours worth of, uh, engagement over 11 touch points over four different channels in order to build brand loyalty, right? So think about that. You think that those, those 11 touch points are all gonna live in the same channel? Of course not. We already said there's gonna be four channels, and we can't even tie online to offline, so that's a whole other thing. And what I find shocking is go to [00:18:00] a sports stadium Someone tell me the ROI of the banner that's sitting in the sports tab,

Jeremy: Yeah, yeah.

Stephan: right?

We know that a copious amount of money was spent on that, right? Okay. We're just gonna assume eyeballs or radio or any of the other things that, that we do as offline marketing. And somehow when it goes online, we seem to have this belief, this fallacy again, that because it can be measured, it should be. I mean, we could technically measure how many molecules of air are in my office right now,

Jeremy: Yeah, yeah.

Stephan: but I don't know that we-- that that would be a good use of our time, right?

So the, the, the question really becomes how are these things additive to the experience that your audience is going through? And this is also why, taking us one step further, I believe in the future, we are going to be focusing more on audience types [00:19:00] and following those audiences. And by the way, it's not a funnel, it's an hourglass.

It goes to the bottom because the sand goes to the bottom. And when people buy something, you're not in the business of selling it to them once. You're here to sell things again and again, hopefully, as well as the people who buy from you, you want them to tell other people so it fills your, your quote unquote, "funnel" again or the top of the hourglass.

So if you really want that, you really need to think about your audience's experience all the way through. All the way through. What does it mean to be a customer? What do they type into the chat bar with your, with your customer success? What are the things they put in the reviews? What are-- And that becomes part of your selling proposition, and that is applicable to either a product line or audience that fits that product line or that specific issue or type or service you're selling, right?

That's how you need to connect it. So it's not gonna be, "I got 'em via email, therefore just more email." It's, "This audience [00:20:00] likes this, and this helps them move along to a place where ultimately there's more of this audience buying from us."

Jeremy: I, I wanna talk more about that, but if we just go back one step in terms of, uh, having an authority platform or program measuring what you're saying, right? From what you're saying, it sounds like, well, that's not gonna happen and it shouldn't happen. Because just say the SEO days, there's the SEMrush and Ahrefs or whatever, right?

That's something the marketing manager can, like, point to. He say, "Well, you know, well, let's, let's have our SEO meeting. Look, how we-- how did we go last month?" For example. But, but, but what you're saying, that thing, because we're so primitive in LLM, like, lifeline, like, it's so early, it's all, like, anecdotal, it's all, like, conversations and, and using logic to think about that instead of pointing to an authority platform and a number.

Would you say that? Like, quite

Stephan: Yes. And I think we need to... Well, uh, i-it's not that there's not numbers. You can still say, and listen,

Jeremy: Yeah

Stephan: uh, [00:21:00] Profound tries to come up with numbers for prompts, right? I don't know how true, uh, I don't know how true these numbers are. I've never really believed that much in Google's MSV anyway. I don't know about you.

You ever run stuff? I don't even know, can you run stuff on zero, on zero search volume paid, on zero search volume terms? Will they let you do that?

Jeremy: No, you can't.

Stephan: 'Cause we can rank on zero volume terms, and I'll tell you, they draw clicks, right? So I know that that's... I know these numbers are not... Now, we could argue, uh, you know, uh, what is a 10 versus a zero, an average out across 12 months, which is what it is, a rolling 12-month average for MSV.

Now I'm getting too technical for a lot of people, but I will say this, um, your... I've never believed that Google was... They were giving you stuff that was directional. At one point, if you remember, they defaulted to this horrible buckets thing, and they were giving it to us in buckets. Oh, so they were giving us search volume in [00:22:00] buckets.

Like, it was buckets where you wouldn't be able to pull it for a term. It'd just be, like, one to a

Jeremy: Oh, they're doing that again now. They're doing that again soon. Yeah, they're just going back to that

Stephan: we had that before, and we were dr- pulling our hair out," 'cause it was like one to a thousand is very different. A thousand searches for something versus 10 is very different.

So stop doing that 'cause it's hard for us to figure out. It's less about the MSV specifically. It's more directional now, and it's more understanding Things don't live in a vacuum. They go together. Uh, I don't know if you ever did this when you were bored in class. Maybe this is just a me thing, or maybe this American thing, or maybe it's...

I don't know. But I used to connect paperclips to one another. And I didn't connect the paperclips in a line necessarily. I would just connect a bunch of them, and then when you pulled one up, a whole bunch of them would come off the table together if you connected enough of

Jeremy: Yeah. I can imagine it.

Stephan: way with keywords.

It's the same way with prompts, right? [00:23:00] The prompts are still relevant by whether it's mathematically with, you know, LLMs predicting the words or whether it's, um, organic similarity through, uh, through the similar nature of the content that ranks for those things. Either way, that stuff travels together. So if you get a better sense of what it's about, it gives you a sense of what you should go for.

And that's kind of where I look at things and say, "Oh, okay, well, when we're talking about SEO, we're trying to perform," but I don't think of content any longer as channel related. I think of it as value related because... Well, it's value and audience related because I can build it. I can take one piece of "content."

The whole idea of repurposing, right, is making another version of that that is a better fit to your audience in the channel in which they're looking. If you, if you [00:24:00] took a blog post and tried to stick it on YouTube,

Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I, I got

Stephan: not a great experience, right? Okay. So, and vice versa. You know, you put a video on the, on the blog, sure, good, but it doesn't get the same attention in the same way.

It's good. I like having blogs have video. If I could have everything have video, sure, 'cause I like video, but that's not how it's, how it

Jeremy: How it's gonna be consumed because whatever context they were in at that time, right? And you kind of gotta follow their

journey. 

Stephan: this is where, I'm gonna tell the people who are spending their money over here trying to chase the LLMs, which I do dipsticks,

Jeremy: Yes.

Stephan: so I understand what's there, but not

Jeremy: Yeah.

Stephan: trading it. More of like the SEO approach that not even, less.

Jeremy: Hmm

Stephan: But the big thing I like to do, 'cause AI definitely has a role in marketing.

I'm not here to tell you it

Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah

Stephan: But here's what I do. I use [00:25:00] AI and LLMs to help essentially create the content I currently have in one format

Jeremy: Mm-hmm.

Stephan: and convert it to a interactive format. So I'll give you a prime example. I had an article that I wish executives would read. It's about four pages long, at least in a PDF it was, and it was all about how one content writer doesn't equal a certain amount of volume output.

You know, they'll go like, "I have a content writer, so I can get four blogs a month out of them." Doesn't work that way. Because I wanted to point out to the executive, hey, if they use a subject matter expert to write the blog, well, their availability and their time and their effort and checking facts with them, all of that stuff takes time.

If it's a really hard to rank for keyword and/or competitive space, they have to do the research. That takes time. Um, depending on the number of words literally you're trying to perform, that takes time. If it needs legal review, [00:26:00] or it needs rounds of review with editing, that takes time. None of that was factored into we, we have one writer therefore, right?

But I know that writing that blog post or that, that article for executives to read was not gonna get read. So what did I do? I took it to Claude, and I said, "Let's turn this into a calculator." I wanna be able to slide back and forth. Uh, it's gonna take, you know, more of an SME's time, less of an SME's time, more or less of this.

How many, how many, how many words are involved in this? All of that stuff, right? I wanna build that into the, uh... I wanna build that into the, the, the plan. And doing that, it gave you what-- Look, look who decided to show up. This is Mila. You wanna say hi? You had a good day, Mila? You wanna say hi? Say hi.[00:27:00] 

Someone is very excited. Hey,

Jeremy: 还没呢？还没

Stephan: wave? Say hi. That's my friend Jeremy. You wanna say hi? Don't be shy. Okay. We're gonna... I'm gonna put her back upstairs.

Jeremy: No problems. Yeah, yeah, no problems

Stephan: Hold on one second

Dad? Sorry about that. She gets excited.

Jeremy: That's okay. All good.

Stephan: made more work for the editor. Okay.

Jeremy: That's okay.

Stephan: So just getting back to where we were.

Jeremy: The PDF, yes. The, yeah, and the calculator

Stephan: of a PDF, we made a calculator, and the calculator allowed them to move back and forth, you know, one, how many, how many words were involved in the content? Um, how difficult was the SERP, right?

Search engine results page. Uh, how many, uh, [00:28:00] how many, how many rounds of reviews did it take? I called it a vibe check. It's on our website. It's available to everybody. Um, but that's the kind of thing that like, do I expect that to rank? No.

Jeremy: Hmm.

Stephan: Do I think it's a great asset and usable thing that provides value to people that could lead them back to our business later because they're really interested and wow, these guys are thinking differently?

Again, I want everyone to keep this in mind. AI-generated content does not perform in search. Does not, okay? It will show up for a minute, you'll see a bump, and then you will see a complete crap of your rankings, and it'll be hard to get them back, okay? Because basically what you said is the easy button is what we use.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Stephan: humans behind it, and both LLMs and search engines don't wanna eat their own tail, right? If, if they're cranking out more AI content as search results, [00:29:00] then crank out more content as... It just creates this, this 

Jeremy: n- it's not good 

Stephan: spiral, right? And they don't want that. So, um, so this is the exception, as I see it, of creating content using AI, is I believe that you can take your current content in one format and challenge your LLM. What are different formats that this could be built in? And I own code, so that whole calculator was just built by the LLM, but I had to struggle and fight with it to make sure it was giving the right answers, the right amount of time, and all this stuff, I believe. But as long as my wisdom is used in that product and the outcome, then it's valuable.

And that could have been the number one thing we send in a newsletter. Ooh, now email just got credit for, uh, uh, for something, right? Or, uh, I, I could even get really crazy and I could run paid ads against it.

Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. [00:30:00] Well,

Stephan: right? Like, but if someone's really looking for a topic that has something to do with that and it's high relevance and it's not a lot of cost because not a lot of people are going after the informational term, but the executives might be looking that stuff up or the head of content of a company is, I just made a connection using paid that wasn't otherwise thought about,

Jeremy: Yeah. Oh, what a, what a very practical example. I didn't think about that because, uh, the, like the way you, you are, you are treating it is like... See, that's a very c- practical example why channel-based, do you know what I mean? Shouldn't take all the credit because there's a lot of things that came before it, and a lot of brains were used.

Your channel was just a way of kind of like, uh, touching it, you know, like

Stephan: It's getting it in front of the right audience, right? Do I think that because someone sees a calculator, right away they go to my contact form and they're like, "Yeah, we need to work with these guys"? No. But do I think that if they were, for example, to have seen this podcast or clips from it in social, and then they happen to go to the [00:31:00] site and play with this calculator, and then they happen to read a blog post on there, or they happen to get a newsletter 'cause they signed up.

Is it the newsletters? Did, does email take all the credit? Does... Are we gonna start trying to figure out whether or not it was the podcast that provided the thing, that provided the thing that got them to walk into the stadium and see the banner, right? No, we're not doing that, right? Like, we're not gonna sit here and do that.

That's crazy. Spend the time, the money, and the effort building more good stuff.

Jeremy: Right.

Stephan: have plenty if-- When you have enough money to get data scientists to do nothing but calculate this stuff, good on you. Do it then. Until you're an embarrassment of riches of money, you need to focus on getting more

Jeremy: Useful

Stephan: good things out there to the right people

Jeremy: Got you. Got you. Okay, cool. So let's go talk about web presence intelligence, WPI,

Stephan: Sure. That's my baby

Jeremy: A- and this is, um, 'cause I think this all leads to it 'cause that's what they're kind of [00:32:00] getting when they get you, right?

Yeah. Like, there's type of ideas

Stephan: this is, this comes, this comes from... Honestly, this isn't new. This predates the LLMs. Um, it includes the LLMs now, but it predates it. I think I've been talking about this topic in different names and formats since 2012. Um, and the reason why is because SEO, again, was, I think the data, and it's the same data for paid, so let's be honest.

I think that data is incredibly valuable to a business. I think it tells you a lot of demand, the way in which people express themselves and what they're looking for and what their problems are and all of that because no one lies to their search bar, right? And I think that's gonna extend to no one's lying to their LLMs, right?

Uh, maybe a little less because soon there's a whole privacy thing going on there that's a little more invasive with files and stuff that you're not giving Google. But nonetheless, we're not there yet. People are treating this thing like their confidant, like their [00:33:00] therapist, like... Yeah.

Jeremy: Yep

Stephan: So we're putting this data in, and we're getting back, as marketers, a lot of understanding of what the demand is like.

Now, our, at least SEO's response to that until now was, "I'm gonna rank for it. I'm the answer." Right? And businesses are really egotistical. They're like, "I'm the answer. I should be the answer." Well, first and foremost, really? Should you be the answer? Are you the best in the world, right? Actually think, are there 100...

If there were 100 companies out there that do this thing, are you in fact, in fact the best at what you do? you really be number one? Now, we could argue back and forth, but that's not it. It's less about Being the answer and more about understanding where answers are being given and opinions are being formulated.

So it's all the other stuff, right? When you go look at a bunch of [00:34:00] prompts for LLMs and a bunch of keywords, what you get back is a bunch of results in aggregate. Now, when you start to look at those results in the context of channels, you learn things really quickly. Hey, there's a Reddit thread that answers this question nine times out of 10, whether it's in an LLM or in the, in the search results.

That means that Reddit thread is incredibly powerful in the conversation, the opinion-making of this. The odds that Reddit thread is gonna get in front of my audience is pretty high. Now, uh, was that like, I hope my social people get the message and hum- somehow naturally find this Reddit thread and advertise on it and/or put a subject matter expert on it, not sell on it, but solve on it.

Really? Like we're just hoping that that's part of s- social's job? How about this, when a publisher shows up and that publisher has an author, right? [00:35:00] And this article shows up really importantly for an, an nano-influence, right, on this topic, but it's super relevant. And by the way, if you were to look up in other products how well it ranks and the keywords it performs for, they're all words you would love to rank for.

Now, the old days used to be like, "I wanna outrank that." But really, should you? You're gonna outrank

Jeremy: Hmm.

Stephan: an actual publisher? But in the meantime, the publisher's giving you display ads. Hmm. I could, instead of buying it programmatically, why wouldn't I go and buy out all that advertising on the page? If I do it, one, my competitor doesn't get to buy it programmatically, so that's awesome.

And then two, I could really hyper target this topic I know people are reading about. Do I think that people are gonna click on the display ad because of that? No, I don't. Display doesn't get clicks usually, but like what is it supposed to do? We're running it to expose our message at a time and place that makes sense to a person we think it makes sense to because of a pixel.

I'm telling you, I don't [00:36:00] need a pixel. I know that if someone lands here, they care about that topic 'cause that's what they enter into an LLM or a search engine, they end up here. Now, what are the odds the display team knew that that was such an important page in the life cycle of a, a, of a user?

Jeremy: well, what a great point. No, yeah, I can, I can see it now 'cause you kind of like unsurface and join the, the kind of departments and you give them the overview of the whole thing, right? But surely

Stephan: No one's responsible for what I'm talking about aside from the CMO, but the CMO will never care about it that much because it's too in the weeds.

Jeremy: that's exactly right.

It's 

Stephan: it crosses the, the... It crosses the silos of a marketing department, okay, in a way that goes horizontal instead of the verticals that are each channel, right?

The social was here, even PR. Think about this, the author of that pub- that, that published piece is probably most likely to, A, write the next piece about that topic, whether it's for that [00:37:00] publication or someone else. Should we reach out to that person? They may not be the most notable journalist, right? But when it comes to this topic, they have experience writing about it.

So what are the odds they get picked again? Now even better, what if they're a freelance writer and I can get them to come write for my brand? Oh my God, I just got you a writer, uh, with authority, which is what Google wants anyway, right? To come work for you. There are partnerships opportunities there. You could even use this for job boards and where to spend your money from a, from a, a, a, from literally a recruitment perspective.

I've saved a company, uh, they had a $500,000 job board budget, and we decided to, you know, whether someone's searching in New York for a sales job versus someone searching in Atlanta, putting in those words like "Atlanta sales jobs" versus "New York sales jobs," we could literally find which job boards were performing better, and we put the ads in the right ones, knowing who was performing best in that market.

And they saved... They got the same [00:38:00] number of, of applicants, and they saved 50% of their spend

Jeremy: Amazing. Okay. So there's so much stuff that, that's happening here. But if, if, if... No, I'm just thinking it's just really, really good. And I'm thinking that if, if the someone did engage with you, right? Like they're gonna have these conversations, but how does it become systematic? Like do they, do they have discovery

Stephan: first and foremost, it's not for everyone, Jeremy. Like, I, I have to just caveat this, right? Listen, if you wanna spend $2,000 and get a report that tells you this about a topic, we can give that to you. Okay? Do I think you should probably spend the 2,000 on that? Not if you don't have multiple channels of marketing that you could actually go execute

Jeremy: to act- action on it anyway,

Right. 

Stephan: I don't wanna give you data. The last thing I wanna do is take money from someone who can't get value out of what I provide. Insights are wonderful, but if you can't... Marketing is a verb, right? You have to take action. So if, if I can't give you [00:39:00] something you can take action on, I'm not really sure you should spend the money.

I'd rather you consult with me with that money, and then we go figure out what you need to create content around, and then you go build it and spend money against writing your content or producing content, I should say. Um, there's so much that I guarantee we can probably look at your website and there's a, a thousand things.

But again, I would say like the sweet s- spot, and this is why... So it's funny, we were trying to bring this to everyone before. It's good for everyone, 'cause it is good for

Jeremy: I think so, yeah

Stephan: insight's good, but not everyone can action off of it. So what we started doing in our engagements was we created a maturity assessment, and the maturity assessment was about like 55 questions that are multiple choice, and the thing is, we'd have multiple people fill them out in the company.

And the reason we did that was because I've done this in the past, perceptions vary depending on who you ask the questions to. So we ended up having to take two one-hour [00:40:00] meetings as part of the deliverable instead of one,

Jeremy: Mm-hmm

Stephan: because what would happen is you'd bring these people to the table, and they both didn't necessarily agree on, well, how often do we consider SEO when we write content?

One's saying never, the other one's saying always. Okay, so that's a conversation that's not naturally happening in your company, right? So I'm here to kinda moderate and get you guys to an agreed-upon amount, at which point then we gave them a roadmap to say, "Hey, listen, if you wanna work without us or whatever, we can give you insights as to the things you should probably do next and prioritize them for you.

But if you really want us to help you along the way, we can do that." And so that was our way of like making sure that if they didn't have these channels, they didn't have the capabilities, they didn't have the wherewithal to do it, let's not go and buy this reporting because it's not going to solve your problems.

Jeremy: So the service, the WPI is actually... So starting with a consultation, et cetera, but there is an ongoing piece that goes with all of that.

Stephan: [00:41:00] Yeah. What we usually do is depending, uh, like again, we don't day trade the same topic. So like someone will say, someone will say, "Okay, we believe that this is like a topic." And usually we don't go too close to the conversion 'cause then it's all your competitors, right? You gotta go a little further up, earlier stage, which allows for a lot of different topics that could be relevant to you, for you to get a sense of what those are, right?

And what's showing up for them. And then once you have an understanding of that market research, that landscape, right, so to speak, you know where to plant your flags. Or I like to think of it as a roulette table. So you could bet red and black for the rest of your night, but I don't think you're gonna make a lot of money that way.

Instead, we can help you decide, hey, you have these chips, and that's enough to, let's say, put on these numbers. So if you have social, let's go look. Oh, you have PR? Okay, let's put some, some chips here. Okay, let's do that. The odds of us hitting [00:42:00] are a lot better than they would've been if we just said one channel, one thing, one little...

Right? We're spreading ourselves out across an audience's likelihood of seeing this stuff, not your stuff. Seeing the answers that are provided to them and using that to your advantage. You think of it as build, which is mostly SEO, but it could also be partnerships. Buy, advertising and so forth. Borrow.

Borrow is literally like, uh, the, the authors, the PR, the other stuff that kind of falls in line with that, right? Uh, uh, writing on a social, uh, uh, forum, that's borrowing. You're borrowing the authority of the forum in order to get the

Jeremy: and you're doing a bit of that. Yeah, that's amazing. That, that's really good. Um, a- as, um, I know we're running out of time, and I really appreciate everything that you, that you're

Stephan: Oh, I, I'm, I'm happy

Jeremy: so much.

Stephan: go on forever, so

Jeremy: there, there's so much. Um, and, and then, uh, I, I really wanted to ask you, like, if people wanted to engage with you or what if you feel like there's anything that we missed today that, that you want the people to know?[00:43:00] 

You've

Stephan: Sure. I mean, listen, I'm always happy to give advice and help along the way, um, probably to a fault. Um, but that's, you know... I usually wear a T-shirt that says, "If you're not helping people, you're just selling stuff." So, uh, I'll, I'll, I'll say this, uh, you can reach out to vibelogic.com, and that's our website.

Feel free to reach out there if you're interested in possibly working with us. Um, otherwise also follow me on LinkedIn, uh, reach out to me on LinkedIn, Stephan, S-T-E-P-H-A-N B-A-J-A-I-O. It's a hard name, but I guarantee you, if you look me up in Google,

Jeremy: There's,

Stephan: Google AI, and LLM, you're gonna find me. Uh, that's my job is to be found, right?

And, uh, and, and ideally, don't sell something to me because I'm not, I'm not buying anything these days. But I am trying to help, um, and solve rather than sell. So if you've got an interesting problem that you're trying to solve, I also love those things. Um, just sitting around and trying, trying to come up with [00:44:00] answers.

Jeremy: A- and I, I've been to your website 'cause I, I do the research and I, I've been to your website. It has really good web copy, dude. It's, like, very clear. Like, you, you guys must do that yourself. And I watch your podcast as well, which I'll tell you more about o- off air. But yeah, no, it's really good, man.

Well,

Stephan: Thank you. 

Jeremy: man, for, for 

Stephan: it. And, uh, and like I said, I'm, I'm always happy to, to share insights. It's kinda what I do. I sometimes feel like I'm yelling into the void, I'm not gonna lie. So if you hear... This is actually for not just me, but I'm just gonna put this out for everyone. If someone inspires you that you're listening to on one of these podcasts, Jeremy as well, I mean, he's the one putting it together, right?

So I'm not, I'm not begging for his subscriptions, likes, all that good stuff, but you should do it if you haven't done it yet. So like and subscribe, as they say. But, but take a second and reach out to that person with a quick note. It doesn't have to be you're not trying to buy from them, you're not trying...

The goodwill that that puts out into the universe is amazing, and you'd be surprised how [00:45:00] few people actually do that. You can really make someone's day by doing it. I don't-- I get it from time to time. People say my stuff helped them. They-- But it's, you don't understand how much time and effort gets put into these type of things, where we don't know what the outcomes are.

If you use one of these strategies and it works for you, God bless you. Like, let me know. I would be nothing

Jeremy: doing

Stephan: joyous to find out that one of these things is helping you or that I was able to help you with your career, or you had a better conversation with your boss because of it. That's all great stuff.

Don't hide that. Uh, share the goodness, I promise you. Uh, the web is a cold, dark place.

Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, I love it. I'm gonna start doing that. Yeah, no, that's amazing. Well, thank you, man. Thanks again, dude. Really good.

Stephan: me. It was a real pleasure

Jeremy: Thanks everyone for listening. 

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