Game Plan For Maintaining Visibility With AI-Powered Shopping Assistants
episode
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
5 min
1 speaker
6 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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What is the core challenge e‑commerce SEO leaders face with AI‑powered shopping assistants?
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit IHear Everything.com. Welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts? Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney.
This is the Voice of Search Podcast. I'm Jordan Cooney, and joining us today is Chris Andrew, co-founder and CEO at Scrunch AI, which helps businesses optimize their presence across generative AI platforms. Okay, final lightning round question here for you.
How should brands start monitoring AI crawlers and agents on their websites?
Game plan. You're the SEO leader at a major e-commerce brand. What's your game plan for maintaining visibility when consumers shift to AI-powered shopping assistants?
Yeah, great question. My foundation would be my monitoring that I'd start today. I would start to deeply understand what is the experience when perplexity, GPT, Gemini, others are landing on my page. That's that's where I would start. The second thing I would do is start to understand the agent experience on my page.
What tests can reveal whether AI agents can complete key customer journeys?
So far we've just been talking about crawlers. The crawler goes to an e-commerce site, tries to retrieve information and surface an answer and maybe a link. We're ultimately moving into a world where agents are actually going to act on our behalf. Really, the first viable player in this space is the open AI operator, right? Where you can actually watch it working on your behalf. You ask it a question and you can sit back and watch as the open AI operator, the agent, goes to Bing, does a search, goes to the page, and tries to complete the action for you. You're actually watching a new search experience. You're watching a customer journey on. Unfold. And so I would pay for a premium version of the product from ChatGPT.
And if I were an e-commerce leader, I would go sit in front of my executive team with the five scenarios that I want to make sure my consumers can get through today as a human. Can they go to my website and buy the t shirt? Can they go to my website and update their shipping information for next day instead of three day? Can they complete these tasks? Yes or no?
Why is it important to evaluate the agent experience versus the traditional crawler experience?
That's the first question. Then I'm I'm going to run those same tasks for an open AI operator. Can the agent, that is the very tip of the spear, there's going to be a million agents to come, but can the agent from maybe the most sophisticated model provider out there, GPT, complete these tasks? Yes or no? If they can't, I'm going to start thinking about what is the experience on my website such that it is causing problems for this agent. I think it's really interesting. Websites cause problems. Problems for humans as they are today. I think there's some, there's some stat out there that like only I think it's just under 70% of human tasks can be completed on a website. We as humans fail frequently at interpreting the content or driving the outcome we want for a website.
We just can't find it. We fail, we make the mistake. So if that's us as humans, how much more successful or less successful is an agent and start to design for more simplistic experience. experiences driving for the outcome.
How can e‑commerce teams use emerging paid formats like Perplexity Ads to stay ahead?
So if I'm an e-commerce site, I'm probably looking to facilitate new transactions. That's probably the number one thing I want to track. If someone's searching on GPT perplexity, et cetera, is my brand showing up with a simple ability to buy? I'd also be dabbling in some of the paid experience. The Perplexity Ads team is really leading the way, testing some new ad formats. Tends to be top of the funnel, tends to be experimental. They're very forthcoming about that. But what an awesome way to get in and influence the future of paid search by experimenting with a portion of your budget to see what's happening in that ecosystem and to get ahead of it.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the core challenge e‑commerce SEO leaders face with AI‑powered shopping assistants?
0:00–0:59
2
How should brands start monitoring AI crawlers and agents on their websites?
0:59–1:28
3
What tests can reveal whether AI agents can complete key customer journeys?
1:28–2:24
4
Why is it important to evaluate the agent experience versus the traditional crawler experience?
2:24–3:17
5
How can e‑commerce teams use emerging paid formats like Perplexity Ads to stay ahead?
3:17–4:10
6
What metrics should leaders track to compare brand visibility on AI platforms versus Google?
4:10–4:53