Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the AI shift every business needs to understand?
Welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A, where we ask and answer questions about business, investing, economics, politics, and more. I'm Sean Aylmer. For the last 20 years, businesses have focused on optimizing their websites for search engines. But what happens when consumers stop searching and start asking AI?
As tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude become part of everyday life, brands are facing a new challenge, making sure they're visible not just to people, but to the AI assistants, increasingly helping people make decisions. It's a fundamental shift in the way consumers discover products, services and information online.
Lonnie Stark is Vice President of Strategy and Product at Adobe, which is a great supporter of Fear and Greed. She joins me this morning from California. Lonnie, welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A.
Thank you for inviting me, Sean. And this is a hot topic right now.
It sure is. Now, I mean, a decade ago, when I was in newspapers and digital mastheads, it was all about search engine optimization. Today, it's all about AI. How significant is that shift?
It is significant. So at Adobe, we've been tracking this trend for over two years now. And what we started to see was that the referral traffic from these AI engines were increasing at four digit percentage points.
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Chapter 2: How are AI tools like ChatGPT changing consumer behavior?
started about two years ago. We're tracking it. It was about a 4,000% increase year over year. The latest report is showing about a 200% increase for travel sites. So again, the numbers are still astonishing. The base is growing and we are all spending more time asking questions about everything in ChatGPT, in perplexity and AI answers.
Okay. I mean, before we kind of get into what that means for businesses, is it the UX, the customer user experience that makes us use AI? So my partner, Jackie and I, we're traveling in sort of six weeks time. I get annoyed when I look up somewhere to look in Beijing, for example, we're going to, and it comes up with websites because I actually don't want a website anymore. I want an answer.
And it's quite phenomenal. And you mentioned travel 200%. I mean, maybe I'm just typical of how it works.
You are typical. So what's happening is we've always been talking about this idea that you and I, we want personalized experiences. And the conversation that's happening in these AI surfaces have become very personal to you. And I think it's a matter of convenience and relevance.
So what's become a business imperative, as you brought up, is not just optimizing the content we provide on our websites and other sources for humans, but also to feed information to these AI engines so that they're able to take it, synthesize it, and accurately represent offers, brands to you. And what we've seen in terms of the behavior is that sometimes that answer is great.
So we call that zero click, meaning they don't even come to your website. They see what they need. Other times they're clicking through on a referral because at some point, perhaps you want more information. You want to book.
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Chapter 3: Why is visibility to AI assistants becoming crucial for brands?
You've talked about IRI being a new customer. Is that where you're going in what you've just said there?
Yes. So the model that we recommend that marketers and businesses think about is that there's a lot of discussion about how AI can help within an organization for productivity. And we provide agents for that as well as Adobe. However, in this case, it's about AI as your audience. So how do you make sure you're providing information to AI? And there's
four things that we think marketers need to look at, which is very much baked into our latest product innovations. One is, can AI find your content? About 80% of the companies we work with, they have content out there for humans, AI can't read it. Two is brand clarity. How does AI understand your brand? So if you are a brand that's focused on value conscious versus luxury,
Is that coming across in the recommendations? Third is brand authority. So what's important here is just like people, when you say, Sean, you're great, I'm also checking with other people, whether they know you, what's happening. Similarly, AI is doing that too. And then fourth is, can it be trusted? So does AI then ultimately recommend you? So similar to humans, now brands need to think about
how they influence AI to have the information they need, but also think favorably and recommend you to the right customers.
Okay. At fear of sounding silly here, does marketing to an AI agent differ much from marketing to a human?
Yes, currently it does. Who knows where IAI is going? But for now, what we've seen is that humans are actually the bar has set higher, meaning humans need more emotive, more interesting things to actually come to your website. You mentioned that you are annoyed when you have to click through to a website.
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Chapter 4: What does Adobe's Brand Visibility do for businesses?
But there are times when people want to click through to a website if it provides beautiful imagery, other deeper information, right? No one is sending their agents to Disneyland is how I put it. So brands need to think about how they make their experiences better for humans. Second, though, is a new part, which is how do they feed the information needed for AI agents?
And what we've seen at least work here is one, lots of facts, right? They want claims that are in place. Two is ideally verifiable. Verifiable in terms of external reviews, testimonials, or even content published to third party sites. And then finally, I think a deeper content strategy.
So whereas when we optimize for humans, we really make sure that the flow was clear and that people got what they needed. With AI, they want the whole corpus of information and they love to get that so they can synthesize it and then in conversations with you, be able to pull it all together.
So is this where Adobe's brand visibility steps in is kind of what you're saying? I kind of understand in theory what you're saying, but doing that is going to be a challenge for most people.
Yes. What people don't really appreciate as brands, as businesses, is the scale that this needs to happen at. I talked to one person and they were saying, well, I checked a couple of things in ChatGPT and it seems completely random. Well, if you do it for one or two searches, yes. But at the scale that's needed, it is predictable.
So what brands need and why we introduced this new solution, Adobe Brand Visibility, is that we recognize that the brands we work with over the past several decades, they now need new tools for being able to understand how their brand is showing up. So that was the genesis of the SEMrush acquisition.
So it was one of the key reasons that we acquired SEMrush was to make sure that we were providing more trusted data to brands in terms of how they're showing up on AI, but also on lots of other channels like social and traditional search. And the second part of it is being able to take action on it.
So in the SEO world, which I love you brought up that we started in search engine optimization, it was fine that at the scale needed and the volumes needed, you had people optimize everything. Now we're at a point where AI, it's ravenous. It wants so much content, information.
And so Adobe brand visibility is also making it faster and easier and at greater scale for brands to optimize the content that's needed. An example of that is an AI agent that helps to generate FAQs or being able to take 10,000 pages that have content visibility challenges for AI and turn them all into content that AI agents have been able to see, read, and then use for citations.
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Chapter 5: How should brands optimize content for AI discovery?
right? So one of the biggest users, funny enough, of search engines is actually AI agents. So that SEO is still important from that perspective. And with Adobe brand visibility, we bring in those signals that make sense for this AI search as well.
The world has changed in the last 18 months to two years. How different will the internet experience be in two years, five years time, Lonnie?
I think a couple of ways. One is just as when things moved into the dot-com era and people had to have a reason to go to physical spaces. I think that the experience that we as humans have with digital experiences, they're going to get richer. Brands are going to have to increase the reasons you would visit directly. They will also need to engage more
with you as a customer and get to know you better. So that's one way. I think the other is that while we talk a lot about conversational, I think the website will become a conversation. So it's going to become much more multimodal and visual. So instead of just a conversation with you, it's going to show you in the conversation imagery and videos and other ways of really engaging with you.
So that conversation is going to also get richer. Third, and I think what people don't recognize yet and what businesses need to think about is the scale of that is going to increase. I give this example that before the Internet, we would go into a store. Let's say you and I, we were looking for black pants online.
we look at maybe three pairs be really grateful there was a pair in our size and buy it right now when we go online we look at endless aisles of all the different styles and i think this world of hyper personalization in five to ten years is that
It's going to even scale up more because it's not going to be just us, but all of our AI agents, they're going to be shopping, crawling, looking for information. And at this point, it's going to be important for businesses to start on that journey by first understanding how to market to AI, because I think the world's going to get crazier.
Sounds like it. Lonnie, thanks for talking to Fear and Greed.
Thank you for having me.
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