Overview
AI is reshaping how agencies operate, but it’s not a simple replacement story. In this conversation, Kerry Guard explores the tension between speed and expertise—where some companies are leaning heavily on AI, while others are realizing that tools alone can’t replace strategic thinking.
Kerry breaks down why low-quality “AI slop” is on the rise, how agencies can evolve instead of becoming obsolete, and why product–market fit still matters more than ever.
The takeaway is clear: AI will change how work gets done, but real value will come from the teams who know how to use it with clarity, depth, and purpose.
Take a listen
Transcript:
Alex 0:00
It's all right, it's Alex on the highways podcast episode 61, we have with us, Jake, hello as usual. And also joining today is Kerry Guard. Nice to have you, Kerry. So we were just sort of riffing offline about how agencies are being disrupted with AI. So let's get into that, because that's kind of like a really burning topic, and we haven't really talked about that, Jake, have we? We've talked a lot about the technical side of AI and business models and related to, like, a typical kind of company situation, but we haven't talked about the agency side. So that is this
Jake 0:43
So that's the part we should do, though, because it's kind of how we both ended up here.
Alex 0:49
Yes, that is right. We've gone from we've gone from agency to product and more platform stuff. But anyway, you're an agency. You're an agency. So maybe you can sort of just give us your perspective, like where you kind of were, like, in terms of the agency world, and then take us to today, with the current AI situation.
Kerry Guard 1:15
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting and exciting. There are sort of two camps in how AI has impacted the agency world before. We were very much looked towards as the experts that we were bringing on for our expertise, that we were going to help create extra manpower and support in terms of making sure that content production is going to end up in the SERPs, so on and so forth. And now with AI, it's sort of splitting into two camps. One camp is which literally just happened to us, where we got let go because they figured the marketing manager could do everything that we were doing, thanks to the help of AI. On the flip side, we just got hired because the VP of Marketing said that their marketing manager was too dependent on AI, and she was running in circles and didn't know which way was up, and needed help, and brought us and is now bringing us off. So the AI psychosis, literally, yeah, so it's definitely impacting us, but I also feel like it's an opportunity in terms of helping people understand that AI is great for people to use it as something that makes you go faster when already having the information and knowing what it is and being an expert In the space and then having AI at your disposal makes you be able to go so much deeper and faster at the same time, which we never really had before. Either you had people very shallow but going very fast, or you had people very deep, going very slow. And now there's this, like a lovely middle ground, but you still need the expert in the seat to do the thing.
Jake 3:00
I agree. There's, you know, I think, not to, not to sound like I'm whining here, but there's a, there's a lot of people these days like running Claude code boot camps and open claw boot camps that, who knows how they're actually applying both of those technologies in their day to day, but they suddenly have a group of 1000 people that they're training, or they're getting experts in, or they're outsourcing, I'm not entirely sure. So I think that the hot there is a gold rush as well, and in that gold rush, there are still people that are shallow, but running faster than ever.
Kerry Guard 3:43
Yeah, but it's dangerous. Who's it dangerous for? Gosh, everybody, I mean, especially for the end user, right? Like the amount of slop out there that we have to sort through to get to the good information is like compounding very quickly, right? And if you don't have users, then you don't have money and opportunity to, you know, do more, right? So like, I feel like, if we ostracize them, most importantly, we're in deep trouble. But then even for ourselves, you know, doing really good work and feeling good about it and putting good out into the world. Yeah, I think it's something we're losing, and that's just kind of a bummer. In my opinion.
Jake 4:32
I would agree with that. I also think Alex likes to come back to a conversation that we had earlier, because I feel like the chicken and egg situation these days is really egg before chicken, whichever way you want to see that. But you know, growing an audience and then building the product is a new model that I think is more prevalent now because of things like AI and people being able to build MVPs very quickly. Vibe, coded tools, or even just AI content or distribution of content through automated systems that people are building an audience, such as the open core boot camp, and then they're finding a way to, like, crowbar some sort of product into it. Now that might seem a little bit unethical, but the one moat that AI doesn't have is distribution, and that's also, I guess, that's what I think is dangerous, at least, I think that is dangerous, giving people who don't know what they're doing a potential massive audience to do some real harm. I mean, we can just switch this into a different topic now, because it's very relevant. But the Louis Theroux documentary, I've not seen it, but, you know, I think that the outcome of that documentary, I'm not sure if you know what I'm talking about, Kerry about the enter the manosphere, regardless of what you think about the topic, the I think the takeaway for me was the there's a lot of people out there, just generally in the world, regardless of whatever sphere that they exist in, that have insane amounts of power, insane amounts of influence, through building audiences in a certain topic, or just sounding like an authority in something that they might not necessarily be an expert in.
Kerry Guard 6:24
Yeah, super dangerous. I Yeah. That documentary was definitely eye-opening for so many, not for others. It was sort of a no-duh. It's an interesting conversation that's sort of happening on, you know, the social media platforms. But I would agree, I the echo chamber, right? Getting caught up in that echo chamber, and then the algorithms learning what you're interested in, I'm always so afraid to click on certain things, like in LinkedIn, of like, Oh no, I'm going to comment on this, and then it's all I'm going to see for a while, right? Of like, and I don't want to be stuck in that. I want to see other points of view, and yeah, and what other people might think about it, not be just constantly served the same thing over and over again, but that's what happens, right? And now with AI, people will go have these conversations. It's like that, not, I mean, it's kind of on topic, kind of off topic. But like, you know, the school shooting that happened in canada was it a shooting or stabbing that happened in Canada because somebody was on AI and they were constantly being fed validation of their actions, of going and having the shooting, and how to do it right? So like, just that reiteration, whether it's happening through conversation with AI or coming around you from a channel perspective, totally dangerous and somewhere where we're going to be interesting to see who starts to put some guard rails up. I know Anthropic is a great company to be doing that. I hope they do continue to do that and lead the way and show what that needs to be, because, yeah, we're going to end up with some scary things that happen in those echo chambers, for sure.
Jake 8:03
I think it's a human thing, though, as well. I don't know if you're guilty of this, but having conversations with AI, and I mean in voice mode, I've had conversations with AI in voice mode, my biggest criticism, and I guess why I don't do it anymore, is because it's boring. It just goes around in a loop. It will agree with you, and then you agree with it, and then that's it. The End of the conversation. It happens after about three minutes. Really, there's no more depth after it, and you'll have forgotten what else you wanted to say, because it will have given you a 32nd answer reflecting back at you what you wanted to hear.
Kerry Guard 8:41
I push it a lot. I say, you know, stop blowing smoke. Tell me what you really think. Go look at the experts. So, I'm as an agency, one of the things I'm finding specifically in the SEO space, is that there's a lot of fragmentation happening in terms of how people are talking about showing up, whether it's in traditional SEO or the answer engines, or now generative engines, right? And so I'm trying to unify it now to just say, Listen, let's just talk about this as search visibility optimization. It doesn't matter where your audience is in terms of how they're searching for you, but you need to make sure you're showing up across the board. And in doing so, I'm talking to AI through it, and I said, What's the difference between off-page SEO and GEO? Because there's this argument happening on LinkedIn right now about, like, everybody's like, good SEO will be good AEO and good Geo. And I'm like, Ah, not really. Like, geo is a whole different beast, and you really have to think about that differently. And if we don't define it and just depend on what traditional SEO has done for us. We're never going to actually show up in the llms, and that's a problem, because the llms one day is going to take over. And so I actually asked Gemini and said, Are these two separate things? And Gemini was like, Absolutely not. They are the same thing. Saying off-page is the same as on-page. And I poked at it and worked through it, and I said, here's how I'm thinking about it. And then it came around and, like, agreed with me. And I was like, Okay, well, now it's agreeing with me, and we're stuck in a loop. And so I went over to Claude, and I had the same conversation with Claude. Claude was like, No, these are two different things. They have to stay that way. And I was like, well, here's how I'm thinking about it. And Claude was like, actually, that's really valid, and here's why. And it's like, backed up from all these different sources as to why, this makes a ton of sense. And so it's, it's interesting, of like, how these different platforms are even thinking. And then, to your point of like, yeah, the validation immediately happens. And then it's like, Okay, now what? Yeah, I agree. Even in different platforms, it's happening like, Okay, now, what do we do and where do we go from here, in terms of making sure that we're thinking beyond what the AI can give us exactly?
Jake 10:55
Yeah, I think nailed it there, thinking beyond what the AI can give us, perfect, perfect framing. Because really, the AI, we've had this conversation a couple of times. I had it last Friday. It gives an average, it gives you an average answer, literally average. So thinking beyond it is important to differentiate if you gave it to conflict in perspectives, and then you asked it to make an average of those conflicting perspectives, as long as it wasn't the typical average, then it would be slightly different. But generally, if you ask it a broad question, or for guidance, it's going to give you something very average, and it will agree with you. And I think that you know, as a human, you have a confirmation bias. You want somebody, you want something to agree with you. You don't necessarily want it. You don't want to go. Is this a good idea? And you go, No, that's a stupid.
Kerry Guard 11:54
No, but you do want something that will question you. So I do think putting in parameters, like I'll ask it to ask me, like, what gaps am I missing here? What? What are other people talking about? Is this already being talked about? Right? Go out there and tell me, I'll sort of find ways to prompt it to almost have it disagree with me in multiple to see if it can disagree with me in multiple ways. And sometimes it does. I'll write a LinkedIn post, and they'll be like, This is crap, and here's why. Like, thank you for that. That's what I needed. I'm trying to write off more than I could chew. It's way too long. It's trying to create too many points. I'm known for that on LinkedIn. But like, having it actually tell me that is super helpful, but I've had to train it to do that, which you can do. It just takes effort.
Jake 12:42
I think Alex, at this point, I know that. I'm not sure we usually ask, but I think we have to give Kerry a little bit of Kerry. Why don't you tell us what you do and tell the audience?
Kerry Guard 12:55
Sure. So I own a digital marketing agency, and have for the last 15 plus years, we've always been remote, and that's why I get to live in the UK while the rest of my team is in the US, primary, primarily work with B to B Tech, SAS, companies in the US, helping them scale and build up through SEO and digital ads, making sure that they're found and visible, and that when users can see them and understand their brand, and then they Go search for them, that they're the answer.
Jake 13:22
That was lovely. That was the best
Alex 13:25
I want to get into something. I want to get into something. Kerry, you say 15 years, so you've been, you've seen a lot in the agency space. Myself and Jake were in-house, in-house markers. So we worked in the tech industry. We worked for the same company for a while, and we also work together on projects, on agency stuff. And I feel like I would say again around chat, GPT launch, like 2022 - 23, something changed. Something changed. I think that, how can I say, like, the value of what we do change? Because suddenly people had access to all that computing for $20 a month, right? And a lot of the guys we used to work with suddenly started doing stuff themselves, as we talked about before, the pod. Then it feels like value creation. And you've seen this for the stock prices of all the big agencies, the big the blue chip ones, wpps, it's been, it's been flattened, right? You can't charge what you used to charge the business models, the billable hour. Business models are kind of broken now. So I think my question is, how do you, how do you, how do you put a price on value creation now, in this in this time when there's basically free compute and AI.
Kerry Guard 14:38
So it comes down to, I mean, for us, we do still go back into hours just to make sure we understand how much time things are generally taking. But it hasn't necessarily been that we dilute or come down in price over time. It's that now we can just do more. More and be more effective. So when I come, when I talk to clients, I'm like, Well, we have the faster we have the faster plan. So it's two plans. You can either go faster, you can go faster, because that's really what it comes down to these days, you know, we can give you in terms of SVL, we can we can give you all of the content briefs and all of the land. But can you actually implement them? Well, probably not. So let's not, if you're scaling up and you're just starting, doesn't make sense for us to be throwing, you know, 10 to 15 assets at you a month, right? So we're going to go on the fast plan, which makes more sense for the resources you have, or if you're digital ads, depending on your ads budget, right? Like we can't, it doesn't make sense for us to charge an agency fee based off of ad spend in terms of percentage when you're not really spending, you know, 25k plus, and even then, like, the percentage needs to be in relation to really, How many platforms, how many campaigns, what's actually being managed, versus just because you're spending more money? Just because you're spending more money doesn't mean it's necessarily more work for us. So in terms of how we're quantifying it, it's really, really it still comes down to hours and speed and what the client can navigate on their end, in terms of what we're giving them and our expertise, it is a premium because we hire people with 10 plus years of experience, who've done this for a long time, who know what they're doing, who can respond relatively quickly because they aren't learning it as they're doing it. And so I think that also comes down to it, as well as the account direction team that we have, the strategy team that's implemented, right? We don't just give you an SEO expert. We make sure that they're supported in the communication and in the strategic insight that's that's coming out. So it's that holistic team that is also coming to the table with that expertise, versus just that one person constantly pumping out, you know, a thing over and over again. It's based in data, it's based in the expertise. And that's really the value that we're bringing and how we're valuing it, from a from $1 standpoint.
Jake 17:15
I'm gonna push back against Alex in Kerry's team here, but I think, I think it's like this, like the value of what you're describing, in some ways, it almost shouldn't change, because it's human-related. Whereas I feel like, if you take, let's say that you're an automation agency, then the value of that service is still being figured out, you know, because people might not necessarily understand the value of it at that point. On the client side, somebody might say, Well, these guys said that they're gonna automate it, and it will whip up 100 articles every minute. You know, then how you know? You don't know the quality of that, whereas in the Kerry model, at least you have some sort of like, well, for this process, this is the predicted outcome, because we've done this and it's built on X amount of years of experience. So I think on the future side, a lot of value surrounding things using AI is still really being defined. It's still being figured out. Because it's like, imagine, back in the day when websites were new, people go, Oh, you've got to get a website. Well, how much do I pay for a website? Do I pay $100 do I pay $1,000 like, what's the website going to do? How many people are going to find it? Is it going to be SEO ready? Is there somebody that's going to take care of that? So it's like, if you don't know anything about websites, let's just say that you were a business, you know, in the late 90s, and you're not going to understand the value of it, either. And I think we're in a stage right now where everything's crashing because of AI, but we still haven't figured out what's valuable in this new landscape. But what we know is what's valuable in the old landscape, and that's, I guess, in some ways, more predictable, and something that people can trust more easily.
Kerry Guard 19:16
I will say outcomes are really important to you. To what you said, Jake, in regards to, we never want to, you know, if we're working with a company who's making an ARR of 3 million a year, right, we're not going to charge the same as somebody who's making 65 million. Again, that comes down to the resources they have, right? 65 million versus 3 million, they have way more resources. But the same time, the math has to math, right? There has to be a return on what we're producing and how we're bringing in pipeline and and that that there is a return on that investment, and we make sure of that, you know through the reporting that we do, but when we're putting a scope of work together, it's hard to say we know for sure that you're going. Make this kind of revenue in this time without really digging in and wrapping our arms around the company, but we look to get there because we think that's important, to make sure that it's all compounding over time towards that pipeline. Create for sure.
Alex 20:13
Yeah. I also think the thing that people overlook with service businesses is that it's very on trend right now to focus on product, like Claude, ChatGPT, like all these AI products, right? And so we're all, all the next generation in, in, in these companies are like, Oh, I can just use ChatGPT. I guess Claude, it's product, product, product, right? But at the end of the day, like you see these companies themselves, like chat open, AI literally announced yesterday they're going to focus on enterprise. The whole team had a big meeting internally, and they said, We need to focus on enterprise, because that's where the you know that those those customers, those enterprise customers, are way more valuable than a 20 bucks a month, you know, guy so obviously, Anthropic is doing really well with enterprise and customer-focused enterprise. So I think, yeah, I think there's like, I think there's like, right now, there's just this bubble about AI products, and in the long run, it will kind of bend. The arc will bend back towards like, value, actual value creation, and service.
Kerry Guard 21:23
Industries head to this all the time, right? Cybersecurity is a great example of this, if we were to sort of mirror them. One, cyber is a bit ahead of AI. And so right now, there's a lot of consolidation happening in cyber, because people are realizing that certain features that they now need, they could just buy a company that already does that, and now bring it into their company. And so AI is going to eventually, that's just how it goes, right? All these startups pop up for all these specific features, and then they start to consolidate into specific products that do certain thing, you know, multiple features that do certain things. And so we'll see that. But right now, it's definitely that startup of everybody's creating everything. And of course, I'm not surprised, but also like banging my head against the wall a little bit, if you're all going after enterprise, which is a very small subset of how many businesses are really out there, then I think they're all going to crash into each other at some point, and they're going to have to look at where those other businesses that could grow with us, that will eventually be an enterprise or be a bigger business. Man, I hate when companies do that drives me up a wall, like it's so short-sighted to just be like, we're all going to go after enterprise. Well, you and everybody else, and yeah.
Alex 22:39
Yeah, look at the B to B. SaaS stock prices right now. They're all tagging.
Jake 22:44
I also think, though, that, you know, LinkedIn, he's driving that sort of where the traffic is going. Because, you know, one month ago it was lovable. This month, it was like Claude. Next month, I've just seen as well, it's like Claude again. I posted on Twitter, Alex, I don't know whether you saw it, but a lot of this, I just deleted ChatGPT, and now I'm on Claude. It's like, everything's gone crazy this, like last month, but next month it'll be something else, because it was open claw before. It was probably like lovable January, open claw February, and it's been the Claude month this month.
Alex 23:23
But I have another question related to product, actually, do you think so? I saw that WPP, the new lady that took over. WPP, she said, that we're going to be a product-focused agency. We're going to make our own products available to clients. So there's some influencer marketing tool, there's some SEO copywriting tool. Do you think like that is that is kind of really not the direction, like you can't just like you can't convert a service agency into a product company, right? What do you stand with that? Do you think agencies will all need to offer products at some point?
Kerry Guard 23:59
Trying to look like way down the line. My prediction is that it probably will feel and operate a bit like a product, but it's going to be internal of how you sort of set it up, and it operates, and it still needs to have humans and in the loop. But my my, my thinking is that what you'll essentially have is less people doing the work and more overseeing. So like you'll for an SEO team, I'll have one person, but then they'll have like, five agents, and each agent will have a specific job to be done in relation to that SEO person doing their work, so that they're more strategic and thinking about where the business needs to go, versus pulling the keywords down and doing a deep dive into it and seeing what competitors are doing like all this will sort of be served up to them, and then they'll be able to analyze it and then say, Okay, this is where the business needs to go. These are my recommendations. Like. Put together a presentation, and then another agent will go out and actually put together the presentation and bring it back, and then it'll be presented to the client. The client will never see these agents or never interact with them. They'll still be interacting with the humans. But the way that the agency model is going to change is that it's not going to be one person up here managing, you know, four people down here who are then mentioning four people down here. You know, as an org chart normally goes, it's going to be, at some point, an expert of, you know, five to 10 years managing a bunch of agents that are going to help them really think strategically about how to do their job. And I think that. And then the agents will connect across channels as well. So the SEO agents will be talking to digital ad agents. Hey, I'm seeing these keywords work. What are you seeing over there? How do you want to optimize? Here's how I'm thinking about optimizing, right? And they're going to be, we're sort of working together. It's going to feel like a product internally, but I don't know that we can sell it like that, because the client isn't going to be logging into a SaaS product and then telling these agents what to do. You still need a human with the expertise telling the agents and reviewing what the agents are doing and making sure that the work is still getting done to the caliber agency done at so that's and I got I got this because I went to a conference in September, and there was a company there called monks. I don't know if you've heard of them. Oh, yeah, agency, yeah. So they showed off their you know how, and they're doing exactly this. So they have an agent for every job to be done in creating a commercial. So they created a puma commercial. It took them two weeks to do end-to-end. All of the assets were still human. So that created them. The photographs came from humans, of humans, the videos, music, all of it, all the assets, came from creators, real creators of real humans within the photos and the videos. But it was the agents that went out to get those videos, that did the customer research, that stitched things together, that made there was an agent for brand continuity, making sure it was completely on brand end to end. So there, it took them months to build, but now they can pump commercials out in two weeks. That is still the output is still human, and I think that's what's interesting, and I do think that that's probably where agencies need to be thinking about and going. But calling it a product is kind of misleading. In my opinion.
Jake 27:24
I think I'm going to be devils. I'm going to play both sides here. I think it'll be a product, but I also think within that product there will be the sort of customized agentic workflow that does need to be governed by the human, so I don't think that the it's not like the end client is going to be using the product. They may plug their API's of their different stack into wpps new product, but there has to be a manager internally that understands agentic workflows, that can customize those workflows to fit with whatever the needs of that specific client are. Have I played both sides?
Kerry Guard 28:07
Marketers are going to want, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, marketers, I'd love to hear in the comments, but I feel like you don't want to log into another thing to be dealing with a bunch of robots. Like it's like, when you call the bank with a problem, you just want to talk to a freaking human. Please, flow from God, please, just give me a human. Right. I don't want to go through this whole tree of telling you who my mother's maiden name is, you know, whatever. Like, I want a human. Give me a human. I feel like, as you know, an agency, I don't think that's going to go away. I think marketers are still going to want to be able to call up, talk to a human, and say, " What's going on. Why is this working? Why isn't it? What are we doing about it? What are we going to be doing next? What's coming on the horizon? What are you thinking about? Not just log into a product and hope for the best.
Alex 29:01
I think also the creative piece is interesting, like we talked earlier about hallucinations and stuff. Like, I've been running this open claw for, I think, two months now, and I asked it to schedule content for my own social media as a test, and it doesn't post it, so it just sets up the drafts in my Telegram, and I trained it on all of my social media posts from LinkedIn, Twitter. I dumped all that content from when I signed up to those services into files. I dumped that into the open claw, and the output has been very disappointing from a creative perspective, bang average. And if that's a representation of the creative for all of this stuff that's coming, then the creativity is still going to be the difference.
Jake 29:49
The difference is, got it workflow design, that's the difference, like the creativity and how you design the workflows, what will effectively all. To adjust the endpoint from the average to something that's unique.
Alex 30:06
But you still need a human in the loop, essentially that, yeah, yeah. And also brainstorming and coming up with ideas and trends, jumping on trends, and humor. I mean, they can't do humor, and humor is a big part of barking like the guys are cutting through the noise online. I've got that, that edge in terms of humor, for sure.
Jake 30:29
You know, I've got Alex, when is it is it time? I'm not sure.
Alex 30:34
It's time. Is it time? You have time for one more question?
Jake 30:37
I think it's another question. Then, then it's time. Yeah, okay, yeah, I was, I was gonna say, Kerry, what do you think in the last, I mean, Alex, you said it was about it was the end of it was 2023. We really started seeing this big impact. I still remember when weird we were working with the Chat GPT and nobody else had figured it out at that point. It was just us. But what do you think's been maybe the biggest disruption that you've personally experienced in the last two, two and a bit years?
Kerry Guard 31:16
So I work on websites, my husband is an engineer, and so he taught me how to do just enough to get by with building websites using NextJS, Tailwind, and In View, and it's night and day in terms of what a the caliber of what I can produce. Like, I had one website where it was for a local moving company out in Ohio, and I was like, this is a moving company. Like, this website needs to move. So I was able to create so much thoughtful animation, right just on word, like, just having, if I'm talking about things rearranging, you know, having the words come in and rearrange to the right point, or the only thing you'll have to lift is your coffee, and having that word lift come in, right? So not having overdone it, being really thoughtful and intentional about it, but things I wouldn't have been able to do before because a I didn't know how, and to figure it out would have taken me ages. So I just didn't think it was worth it, right? But now I can add just that little bit of extra flurry to for that customer engagement, right? And that AHA and that wow moment that I wasn't able to do before. And I think that's really again, coming back to what I said earlier. That's the power of AI when you put the tool in the hands of people who have a really good foundational understanding of how things are supposed to work. The output is just so much more phenomenal than what we could have ever done before. And that's that's been the most disruptive, I think, for me personally, and what I'm looking forward to doing more of in the future.
Jake 32:58
Alex, it's a good setup. Very good step. Okay, Kerry, it's time for the final question of the show. Brace yourself. It gets everybody. It's future predictions. What are your future predictions? It could be about anything. It could be your life, your work, the world. Go. Could be agencies?
Kerry Guard 33:22
Yeah, I think, I think we're on a on a turning point with search engine optimization in particular. I think it's very disjointed right now. I think people don't know what to do about it. If I have clients showing up every day asking me, " How do I show up in chat? GPT, right? Like, that's my traffic is dropping 40%, what do I do about it? So I think the whole marketing, how we do marketing, is about to sort of turn on its head, in regards to what we could get away with before that we can't get away with now, like we could do marketing without true product market fit, right? We could skirt the edges. We could outspend our competitors. We could just have a bigger sales team. And now, if we don't have real product market fit, meaning a problem we really solve that no one else solves, or in a different way, in a way that nobody else solves it, and talk about it in that way consistently almost everywhere, then we're going, we're never going to be found, because you can spend all the dollars and all the land to get seen, but then if people are trying to search for you, to validate what they're seeing, and they can't find you, then your brand is never going to grow and evolve. And so I think we're, we're at a turning point right now with how we show up, from, you know, in marketing, of really having to slow down for a second and understand our customers and really what they go through on a daily basis. How our products show up and support them. And I think we're going to have less products be successful, but they're going to be the better products in the long run anyway. And the marketing is going to get better in doing so and supporting that. It's going to be the next five to 10 years is gonna be really interesting in how AI search, or calling it search visibility optimization, how that really impacts what products actually make it.
Alex 35:29
So 10 blue links are dead, or, Oh yeah, they're dead.
Kerry Guard 35:35
It's, it's a leading indicator, like being knowing that you're ranking top for that keyword in validation to what people are searching for in llms is a leading indicator to the answer engines and to LLMs to say they are an authoritative voice in this space, but it's only one indicator out of many. So yes, you need that, but it's not the only thing you need.
Jake 35:57
I was actually that brings me back. I was about to say this earlier. I'm glad that you reminded me, but I do feel like when the whole LLM SEO, call it what you will, you're more of an expert in it than me. People like, Oh, you've got to hack Reddit, spam Reddit, and Quora, and you'll rank. I think that those kind of tactics are going to disappear, because I agree, I think it's going to be, is this product, or is this service, a credible product or service, not one that's just game to the system, and because we've got the LLM, you'll be able to figure out which ones are gamers and which ones are the real deal quicker.
Kerry Guard 36:39
Yeah. People are panicking right now because there's misinformation out there about their products, because people are gaming the system, but they just need to get out there and keep doing what they're doing. And white hat, black hat's always been a problem, right? So the white hat tactics are always going to win out. Google and Claude, especially, are going to lean into that user experience and always prioritize the user, and in doing so, they're going to prioritize the brands that are showing up in the most morale, the moral way, for sure, in the long run.
Alex 37:13
Oh, not Nope. Did the good guys win? Yeah, that's nice for a change. Normally, we end on like a doom I do more kind of note, so that's good, okay. All right, let's have you back on Kerry in like, a year and see how things are shaping up. Let's do it awesome. All right, guys, that was good. See you in the next one. Take care. Bye. Bye.
