Priscilla McKinney:
I am so lucky to get invited to some pretty crazy events. And then at those crazy events, I meet crazy people. And I am telling you, when I am very much awake and alive to the problems that my clients have when I attend events or get invited to a fireside chat, I am listening not only to solve my own problems but to solve the problems of my clients.
And we’re gonna talk to an amazing expert today. Adam Bittner is a global commercial leader, he is very experienced. He has been scaling revenue engines behind consumer intelligence, retail media, digital commerce platforms, and he has worked with some of the biggest names in the industry CPG and manufacturers and retails.
But right now he serves as the global head of business development and partnerships at Brand Rank AI. And if there is a touchy subject that my clients are asking about right now, it is where do I get cited on AI? How do I get cited on AI? And my gosh, please help me get signed in on AI.
So we’re gonna talk to him and get down to the nitty-gritty for sure about the entire commercial engine that people are using for early stage AI marketing technology. And so this company has really come in to help really define a new category, and that is answer and generative engine optimization.
Now, you know, we have SEO, people are pretty good with that, but the AEO and GEO world is somewhere that I consider it to be the wild, wild west right now. So I brought an expert in for you. We’re going to grill him. So Adam, welcome to the show.
Adam Bittner:
So happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Excited to talk with you today. And Wild West, I think you nailed it spot on. It’s just so new for everyone. You know, it’s a very burgeoning fun space.
Priscilla McKinney:
Yeah, well I’m glad you think it’s fun. Right now it’s driving me crazy, but let’s go with fun. But just a shout out to Burke, they invited me to an event where they had you as a speaker, and so that’s where we met. And I think it’s always great to point out just some great networking.
You know, in our world, we’re all faced with really big challenges, really difficult problems, and I love finding people who want to collaborate. Obviously I wrote a book on it and I feel that it’s really important. So I’m so pleased to have you on.
I hope that you get some clients from this, but I know I’m gonna get learning out of it. And so I feel like my audience is gonna learn and so it’s just a win-win-win, which is what I love. But let’s get down just right at it from the very get-go.
What people are worried about the most is that they’ve spent so much time, money, effort building a brand story. And they feel like they locked it in now on their website, hopefully in their marketing materials, even as their teams go to conferences, and yet now there’s an entire new channel out there, and the AI engines are telling people things, but we are not sure what things they are telling people.
And so answer for me in the best way you can: who is really controlling brand stories when it’s an AI engine now and not necessarily you or the masterful SEO plan you’ve created on Google.
Adam Bittner:
Yeah, no, it’s a great question. And really we see it going in various different directions. There’s the brand side, there’s the technological side, there’s the retail side, right? If you’re in that B2C type of space.
You know, on the brand side to your point, these brands have really designed for digital for e-commerce now for decades. But what’s happened though is you go to a lot of brand.coms, it’s very much a story, but also a buy now story. It’s not necessarily telling that holistic story into what they’re meant for.
It’s very consumer facing. It’s beautiful imagery, videos, PDFs, what have you. With AI, AI doesn’t really necessarily care about those images. They don’t care about the PDFs. They want to be able to crawl quick, fast information, because the more information to which you make it difficult for them to crawl, it takes more tokens.
So they lean that quick accessibility, all that beautiful information that sits behind the scenes for B2C, B2B. They want that information. The information systems are dying for that so that they can be more articulate in their answers there.
So it really implicates all areas of the business. Ultimately, we think it’s really brand needs to own it, but is legal involved, is IT involved, is digital involved? Yes, yes, yes, yes. But truly it’s such a dynamic space, it’s tremendous opportunities. But the brands that are gonna have that success are the ones that are getting a little bit ahead and working cohesively across those teams on new dynamic workflows.
Priscilla McKinney:
Okay, I love this. Let’s break this down even further. Like, let’s talk about B2C. So people have been building, let’s go with PDP, like product description pages, right? And whenever we use an acronym in this show, we just explain.
Okay. So like when you are out and you’re shopping on a website, somebody has spent a lot of time figuring out exactly how to optimize that product page. What kind of messaging needs to be said? So there’s a lot of work that went on. Maybe you don’t know about it, but let me tell you, there’s a lot of work that happened there.
But then, if you were to go directly to Google, then you might say, well, what’s the best skincare product? Google might be searching a subreddit somewhere and bringing a story to life from a consumer. So there’s so many other things it could be playing from.
And so what you’re saying is that in the CPG world, they’ve probably mastered their PDP. They’ve probably mastered maybe even at this point, you think about Rufus on Amazon or Sparky out on Walmart, all these little AI helpers, people have already rejiggered their information for their products so that those AI bots can find it.
And let’s move that over to B2B real quick. So hello all my thought leadership. All kinds of things that I talk about. I talk about digital transformation success. I’ve waxed eloquently about LinkedIn influence and all these things that are meaningful to my company, but where those are now being scooped up and evaluated is what matters.
So there is a question here, Adam. So in those two pieces, kind of how do you describe that gap? Where is it that AI is looking that we basically haven’t prepared ourselves for?
Adam Bittner:
To your point, these brands B2C and B2B have really prepared for organic SEO for quite a while. It’s through Google. If you’re B2C, it’s on the Amazon, it’s on the Walmart, it’s on the Kroger’s, it’s on the Targets. But in this new environment, the AI crawlers are a little bit different.
And to what I was kind of describing earlier, these sites have been designed for Adam goes to this website, he clicks on it, he does a search, what does he find? The bots aren’t necessarily following that same profile, they’re trying to solve an answer. I’m saying what’s the best fill in the blank.
I’ve got a party this weekend, what should I buy? My HVAC just went crazy, who do I find to be able to fix that? It’s looking for an answer and it’s trying to do it as quick as possible. We find that these engines are very academic in nature, that’s what they were built on.
They’re institutionalized about information. So think of them as almost that university professor. They’re looking for citations, quotations, details, specifics. To what we learned today, and I mentioned briefly, PDFs, images, videos, there’s a little bit more difficult in today’s crawling environment for AI to really diagnose and to really digest. You gotta provide some of that transcript information.
And that’s where I think the opportunities for the brand is that in both B2C and B2B is they have this information. It’s just not in a presentable manner yet for the AI to truly ingest, which is really a powerful opportunity for those brands to adjust. Very, very low hanging fruit to adjust.
Priscilla McKinney:
Okay, I love that. Now I want to know what these phone calls that you take sound like. So tell me what people are saying when they come to you. What are they losing sleep about? How do they lead the conversation? Where does that all start? Right after they go, Adam, right?
Adam Bittner:
I love that. You know, there’s always a bell curve of adoption. You’ve got some folks who say, hey, should I care about this space? Like, yeah. Some folks are saying, hey, we’re already testing some solutions, can you all be a test to that? So there’s always that curve of adoption for sure.
I will say, at the start of all those conversations, be it if they’re early on or they’re more advanced, every one of them is so funny. They’re like, we’re behind. And you’re like, you’re not behind. It’s the things that are changing so fast. This is the fastest adopted technology in human history ever. Just everyone kind of let that soak in for a second to where how quick and how fast this environment’s moving.
We’re all trying to learn and understand what are those implications. You know, we were just talking about Claude and Cowork and the integrations to what you can do. So the space is moving extraordinarily fast. We’re all trying to understand to where it can go.
In those conversations that are earlier in stage, it’s much more of an education, an implication to help folks and especially at a leadership level understand how does this really implicate the brand. These are folks that are maybe not even necessarily familiar with SEO, so now making them familiar with agentic commerce and AEO, it’s just a new muscle in education.
So leaving those conversations, it’s certainly a journey with them is bringing them along, but importantly showing them how this is very scientific and how it’s measurable. And so where you’re making these changes, how do you quantify the up, how do you quantify the down, and understand those improvements over time.
For those that are a little bit more advanced, it’s really understanding with them is what workflows are to think about designing around and how they’re integrating IT and legal, et cetera, et cetera, and really to work with them in that type of environment to how they can move fast, even though they’re potentially a big, enormous company, but how they can be very nimble in this new environment given that it’s a new speed.
At the end of the day, I think as these new technologies come on, we think of it as a new challenge. I always think about and reference, but we’ve kind been through some of these things before. COVID, you know, we’ve got those playbooks now. E-commerce, at the advent of e-commerce, I kind of think about it like that. Is Amazon really gonna be big? Are people really gonna wanna buy items online?
And those brands that got ahead of it from a testing perspective and just thoughtful about what technologies, talent they need to put in place to be successful, those are the ones that ultimately are at the stage they are now and had tremendous success with Amazons and the Walmarts of the world.
Priscilla McKinney:
Yeah, yeah. I mean I remember the first Christmas I tried Amazon and I had such shoddy internet, you know, bang bong bong bang bim bim bim shh. Remember that?
Adam Bittner:
The images are loaded, you see the spiral, yeah, yeah.
Priscilla McKinney:
And it took so long for each page to load. And I literally was clicking probably the last gift that I had decided to put in my basket for my whole family. And I probably was there two or three hours and then the thing crashed and it didn’t save the shopping cart at that point.
We’ve come a long way, maybe. On the way to work, I literally put in my Amazon cart some ponytail holders. I put some drinks that I renew and then it was like, well, if you want it today, why don’t you add six dollars more of something and we’ll bring it to you today?
And I’m like, okay, boom, done. And I press that. That’s be as I was like reaching for my car door, and like, okay, great, that’ll be on my porch when I get home today. I mean, just this is so bonkers. This is so bonkers, and so I appreciate that.
Obviously, with where your company is, you believe that this can be changed, you believe that this can be fixed, that we can alter or at least inform what AI perceives about our brand. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have created this entire company. So, what is possible there? Because a lot of us are really hurting with thinking about the work that we’ve done.
And I try and explain to my clients look, the work you’ve done on SEO, it’s not wasted. This still is a major part of what we’ve done. We haven’t lost it, but we need to build from here. And it’s a very different world. We’re gonna need the things that brought us here, they’re not the things that are gonna bring us to the next spot.
So you obviously believe it can be fixed. Where do you start explaining to people how that process works?
Adam Bittner:
For sure we recommend start with an audit, get that baseline assessment, like where are we at. And to what I kind of describe as you gotta measure, you gotta start somewhere, you gotta understand to where the outages are, where the potential is, in lieu of the category as well as competition.
But it’s extraordinarily scientific. To your comment on SEO, we couldn’t agree more. SEO is not going away. We find AEO is gonna overtake it, it’s projected by eMarketer to overtake it in 28, I think it might happen early, potentially as early as next year because it’s moving so fast.
But the changes you make with AEO are gonna complement SEO. So it’s just a natural synergy to where you’re just making additional enhancements that are gonna benefit the LLMs, but naturally continue to benefit SEO. But it’s extraordinarily scientific into the code, the schema, the process to which you’re putting in place.
But the big thing I underscore with the audience is to understand though what the truly the measurement. How do you understand the improvements, the new content you’re putting forward? The adjustments you’re making to your brand story, your messaging, is it resonating with these LLMs? And I say resonating in particular, you gotta market to them.
It’s truly a new channel. So very, very adjustable, very, very winnable with some of these key building blocks in place, be it a partner like us or some sort of partner in the ecosystem.
Priscilla McKinney:
Yeah. Well, for so many of my clients, we’ve been a content marketing company for so long. We have preached all the SOPs that do that long game. Yes, we might have paid for ads or Google recognition early in the game, but the whole idea was always to outpace it with content.
And then when I get a client there, I think about a steel manufacturing company I work for, like a big region, covers about five, six, seven states, and now we started, we started 12 years ago on that. Nobody can unseat them. I mean, they are found for ridiculous keywords, right? And so people can’t unseat them.
But then, of course, that’s my concern now. Is like, how do I do that for them? But in AEO and make sure that we’re winning. Also, I had another client that was a local business, and she sent me screenshots so frustrated that she was in ChatGPT asking about their work, they’re a chiropractor, and it was bringing up photos when it was asking for her about more information about her company.
It was bringing up photos of other people’s like waiting rooms that were nasty where theirs is wonderful and she’s so frustrated with like why is our beautiful waiting room not showing for us but then when I ask about competitors it’s showing for them those are our images and AI is confused and these are revenue issues, these are not I’m frustrated with SEO or AEO.
This is how are we going to make sure that we maintain our competitive moat? And so this is super, super important. Okay, so this is obviously the world that people are in. You say start with an audit, super important. Let’s get a baseline. What is going on here? But besides the audit, where do you see people go right or wrong with after that? Because I’m sure at this point you’ve seen both.
Adam Bittner:
Yeah, there’s definitely that dividing line to who takes the action, who doesn’t. And just to kind of touch upon your point there with AI, that’s part of the opportunity and the challenge. It’s not only do you show up what we call visibility, it’s what we call like brand health or brand vulnerability as well.
What if it hallucinates? It says you don’t have a waiting room, this isn’t available, it says the wrong price point, and that’s part of that audit, that ongoing measurement which is crucial to provide. And to where we see folks that have that success, they understand this is a marathon, it’s not a sprint.
You know, those that are trying to get the quick fixes, you might see a pop, or those that we’ve seen have failed, not only focus in on a quick fix, not really about their brand story. They also are trying to like, how do I prompt my way out of this? How do I buy my way out of this? This is not the environment for that.
Maybe over time, it is truly going to be more paid like traditional SEO. It’s not there yet. Those that are really taking this from a brand perspective to say, what do we want to be known for? What do we want to stand for? And really thinking about purposefully and really choicefully of what are those different departments, those different titles that I need to bring into that conversation.
And how do we unlock, understand how do we crawl, walk, run? Where can we really sprint? Legal says, I don’t care, just go. If I’m gonna post on this subject, legal says, you’re good, go ahead and run. And to where you can court it off to say, no, no, these are types of conversations of content to which we need to have more dialogue around.
Those are the ones that are really moving fast. And I say, we work publicly with some very, very large organizations. Most recently, had done a presentation, our CEO, Pete, with KenVue and I also really, really impressed with KenVue into the quickness and speed to which they’re able to be nimble, being such a large, dynamic global organization and they’re really doing some special work over there.
Priscilla McKinney:
I love that. And thinking about some of the easy things you can do kind of divides the landscape. So let let me kind of pick this apart a little bit for you because I’ve talked with you. I know what your system can do. I do believe at this point it’s built for enterprise, which can be very frustrating for a small business who is incredibly sensitive about someone else using their hard won content and getting some gain for it.
So this is kind of where we are in the world. These are new tools with AI, and so they’re expensive to develop. So we’re kind of at that beginning again where websites were expensive. Now websites are cheap, right? But right now, AEO is expensive. Eventually, maybe we hope AEO will get cheaper.
But right now, let’s talk about two things: enterprise versus small business. And then let’s kind of break it down and talk a little bit about B2B versus B2C. Because I think those are very helpful conversations in this podcast for people who want to have digital transformation success and want to be able to carry their company to the next win.
So let’s start with the small versus enterprise. What are your thoughts on that?
Adam Bittner:
No, it’s a great comment. People think large small. They think this is kind of a B2C issue, B2B is very different. And I think everyone’s involved here and has the opportunity. Large versus small, we certainly work across the gamut.
I’ll say the engagement for large is gonna look different than that small organization. But certainly I think all have opportunity to drive some of those improvements and from our vantage point, we just service differently. To where the frequency and the cadence with a small organization is probably gonna be less frequent.
There’s probably less content changes, less involvement, less consultation, but certainly can you still measure and understand and drive performance for your overall AEO strategy? Absolutely. But that change in that model is just there to make sure that’s more flexible depending on who you’re working with and who you’re speaking with.
And I think with all of our backgrounds we naturally gravitate into what’s more often in the news is B2C. I do a prompt and it hallucinates and it’s funny and it’s usually more on some sort of side of where it’s consumer facing.
But to where I think about what’s more interesting and to where a lot of our business is really focused is really more on that B2B. If I think about the B2B space, if I miss a search, I miss a six-figure deal, seven figure deal. What if it’s a health organization, a home builder, to your point, a steel manufacturer? If procurement’s going to do that search and that B2B organization is not showing up, they have tremendous risk.
Whereas on the consumer side, how often, if at all, are folks searching for that $399 fill in the blank, probably less frequently, less often, they have less risk at today’s current stage. So I think in the day there’s variability into the service levels for big and small. Certainly can help with both, and we run across the gamut. And I think of the mix as B2B plus B2C, not one or the other, but really I think an opportunity for both of them. And frankly, B2B can move a little bit faster because they have less challenges sometimes on the legal front.
Priscilla McKinney:
Well, that’s interesting that you say there’s fewer challenges, but for me, there’s just bigger reward. About 90% of the work we do is B2B. And I’m very good at selling a $250,000 qualitative study, right. I know how to help my clients do that, or a $50,000 global quantitative survey.
You know, these are things that we’re helping our clients sell every day. And it feels like when you get it right and you get recognized in AEO and you start winning that game, the reward is big. And so I think that’s why there’s a struggle in B2C. Unless you’re a huge volume manufacturer or you’re a huge retailer, it feels like it’s very expensive to get in there.
So I guess, first of all, you mentioned getting a baseline. Obviously, your company provides an audit, and I would love for people to go talk with you about it. It’s Adam Bittner, A-D-A-M Bittner, B-I-T-T-N-E-R. Find him on LinkedIn super easy.
And just as a thank you for sharing your expertise, I just want to tell people, hey, go talk with them at brandrank.ai and take a look at what this looks like for an audit. I’m not paid to say that, so I’m just telling you, if you want to, do it. But the next thing I would say is, can you give people just a few tips and tricks?
It’s like some things that you mentioned there, there might be a few things that are, you know, you can get a bang at the beginning. It’s probably not gonna last because of the way things are changing so quickly. But where could they start, even just to play around to get to begin to really understand AEO? Right? So, what would you have them do today?
Adam Bittner:
I think the big thing is to reach out to folks like myself, just to understand your point, get a free assessment, where am I even starting at? There’s so much low-hanging fruit into the basics and guidelines to which Google has provided, to which we can provide as well. You know, start with that, really kind of view into your website to understand, is it very consumer-facing, images, PDFs, videos to which you can really quickly understand to say, this isn’t gonna be crawlable.
Evaluate your content. Have you not posted content in months? Low hanging fruit to say, hey, talk to Priscilla’s organization here, I’m sure they could help. But just doing that evaluation on your LinkedIn presence, your website to say, this is maybe a website we haven’t touched for a decade. We haven’t looked at our R&D for years.
These are just such low hanging fruit is to use those as fodder to feed that content engine in that ideation of how do you really differentiate and show knowledge base to these LLMs going forward. And oftentimes in behind the scenes in your Google Drives and your Microsoft drives, you’ve got troves and troves of information that just necessarily hasn’t been pushed live. So a lot of easy ways to get some quick wins.
Priscilla McKinney:
I love it. And you mentioned LinkedIn in there. And I think that’s an interesting point that a lot of people don’t understand. Once upon a time, LinkedIn was a locked entity, meaning the it, Google, the SEO, all of those search engines were only crawling over the profile portion.
And so whatever you put over there in your profile, which I teach people all the time, please clean up your profile. It’s like don’t invite anybody over to your house if your underwear is sitting out in the hallway. It’s the same thing. Don’t try and connect with anybody on LinkedIn if you haven’t cleaned up your profile, right?
So obviously having that clean was super important. But what shifted several years ago was that LinkedIn became an open network in terms of search. And so if you are a prolific writer on LinkedIn, or if you have 12 people on your team who are influential, who are talking about your company, this is amazing fodder.
It was for SEO, and now it also is for AEO. And in fact, AEO seems to be ranking this a little bit higher because it’s very organic, it’s coming from multiple individuals and so I think that’s a really great point. I just want to underscore companies have devalued and have not really invested in their people in helping make them influential on LinkedIn.
And I mean, I teach a course on it so I have a vested interest in saying that, but it’s my podcast so I can say whatever I want, but I love hearing from somebody just how valuable that can be as a pretty simple thing you can do. You know, helping your team get involved on LinkedIn and really adding to that story and adding to the bulk of what’s out there.
So any parting thoughts or things you wish that would be fixed or things that are driving you crazy, Adam.
Adam Bittner:
I think the big thing is to where folks feel there’s so much information, there’s so many things on their plates in today’s day and age and different priorities, they’re kind of pushing this to a side or just to say, well, not yet, not right now.
And I would stress to those individuals, this is the quickest, easiest thing to act on, as we were just describing, to get up and going, it’s low involvement cost on the organizational end, but it’s gonna help you get that much further ahead of the sprints. Or what I think about is almost like a land grab.
Those that can get ahead of it, it is tremendous opportunity. The investment that they can make in 2026, it’s dividends that’s gonna double, triple, quadruple into 27, 28, 29. So tremendous opportunity just to get ahead. And it takes just a little bit of effort, but super easy to get started.
Priscilla McKinney:
Okay, well, I want to talk about one last thing here. You and I have talked offline a little bit, and I know your take on this about this does not mean that people have to write all new content. So before you get completely afraid that you just have to start over whatever, there’s some simple things, fixing some schema on your website, maybe even adding some FAQs, talking in more conversational tone, these kinds of things.
But just so that people understand, after they get an audit from you, are there practical things they can do? Is that what you create a plan? What’s next?
Adam Bittner:
Yeah, it’s really providing that like content calendar, that strategy, that implementation. It doesn’t all happen on day one. This is a journey. And it’s really kind of working within that organization and that team to understand like what can change overnight.
It’s an evaluation of schema, code, dot com, is it actually crawlable? There’s technical terms, robot.txt files. Sometimes it just prevents crawlability. So there’s these low hanging fruit things to which can be implemented and changed, but just to underscore and to your point, these aren’t things that are gonna require full headcounts to start.
This isn’t organizational change. This is just more of an identification of this is a key priority and to which the brands can get that much further ahead in partnership like with an organization like ours, they’re gonna be so much further ahead than the competition, which is saying like we got bigger fires to worry about at this time.
Priscilla McKinney:
Right, I love it. Okay, go check him out at Brandrank AI. Obviously, Adam and I could talk forever because this is just what is now. This is incredibly important. So please reach out to him if you have any other questions. Adam, thank you so much for just being a joy, just being able to share your expertise and being open about it. I appreciate it.
Adam Bittner:
Yeah. It’s a fun topic. Thanks so much for the time.
