Recommended or Rejected: Does AI Trust You

If we do not show up, you're screwed. Ai, you're in big trouble. You will, you will have a major lead problem, which means you don't generate enough customers, revenue in your left saying, I don't understand. We were so good 10 years ago. Do we think the future is one where we do a search and we see dozens of blue links that we can choose from? Or is it one where we do a search, we do a query, and we get a very specific answer to our specific needs, and then it even says to us, and oh, by the way, we can take an action the next step. If you would like to take that next step. What happens when paid ads just aren't a play any longer? If your business right now relies on the traditional search and paid acquisition on those channels, you have to come up with a plan. Today, I am very excited to be joined by Marcus Sheridan. If you don't know who he is, you gotta know Marcus. He's the author of multiple books, including They Ask You Answer And Endless Customers is an extremely popular keynote speaker. His latest venture is ai trust signals. com, the leading tool for determining if AI will recommend your business. Marcus Sheridan, welcome back to the Show. Let's ghost ELs. I don't know what number this is. It's a lot. And I'm happy to be here and I certainly appreciate your community And I appreciate your wisdom. So today Marcus and I are gonna explore how to show up in ai. So Marcus, uh, for context, for some people who don't know who you are, uh, you've been around for a long time. You used to be known as the River Pools guy, then you're known as the Sales Lion, and kind of a, a content marketer. And now obviously, um, you're pivoting or expanding, as I like to say, like me into the world of ai. So given those lenses for people that dunno who you are, I would love to understand, like from your perspective, why is visibility in AI so critical for marketers, entrepreneurs, anybody else who happens to be listening? Yeah, I think this is our, in terms of the way we're found online, lang, I think this our entire future. I mean, let's just look at the last 20 years. In the last 20 years, for the most part, you had to win over two parties As a business. Number one, you had to win over the customer. That's never gonna change, right? That's always gonna be true. Number two, you had to win over the search engine. And of course, the way you went over the search engine was essentially twofold. Either A, you did it through great content like content marketing or SEO. That's one way they recommended you the search engine, or B, you gave them money, right? That's called paid ads. And that was the better part of 20 years. Suddenly we see Chate enters the fray. Now we've got all these LLMs as these different platforms. And here's the part that I think so many people are still just for some reason missing out on. 'cause when we look at the future, do we think the future is one where we do a search or we do a query and we see dozens of blue links that we can choose from? Or is it one where we do a search, we do a query, and we get a very specific answer to our specific needs. The answer has a justification or an explanation as to why it said what it said, and then it even says to us, and oh, by the way, we can take an action the next step if you would like to take that next step. Now, if you talk to anybody, Mike, they're like, it's obvious that's where we're headed. Blue links are gonna die. I'm not gonna sit here and say Google's going to die. I mean, eventually will, because all platforms Explain what you mean by blue links. 'cause people may not understand what that means. The blue Links you've been clicking on for 20 years, when you go to Google, that's the blue links and that's not your future because you don't know really, like a blue link wasn't built for you. It was built primarily based on words that were on that screen that meet an algorithms demand and therefore shows the thing why this is so powerful though, if we look at it, Mike, it's like, you know, back in the day if you weren't on the first page of Google, that really sucked, but hey, at least I'm on page two and I'm making progress. It doesn't work like that today. You're either recommended part of the answer or you're rejected. There's nothing in between. That's it. That's where this is so different. It's like a different way of thinking because it's like, wow, there's, it doesn't matter that I'm on, there's no page two, I'm just not there. And as everybody shifts over, and I think so many are saying, well, Google's not slowing down. Come on y'all, ev when I, I have pulled, uh, every audience for the last six months that I've been with Mike and every audience I've said, how many of you now use chat GBT as your preferred means of finding answers online or getting what you want online for my audiences, blue and white collar, white collar mix, 50%. What's that number gonna be in six months, in 12 months?

We're not going back to the way legacy Google has been built, which means we have to find a way to make sure humans continue to love us. But now AI's gotta love us and they gotta trust us. 'cause they don't trust us. They're not gonna recommend us. So, and I'll just throw in my thoughts in this. 'cause folks that listen to this show may know that I have another show called AI Explored and I talked to lots of people over there like ran Fishkin. I can't remember if I talked to 'em here or there to be honest with you. But, um, I'm with you. I believe that Google is going to eventually just be the single best answer. This is the phrase I've been using for a long time. I believe that this is how it works with humans. You go to someone like I go to Marcus if I'm interested in certain things like that, Marcus is an expert in, and I don't ask 'em to give a list of five things. I ask 'em to tell me what's best, right? What is the best pool? He's going to say fiberglass. And he is gonna make a case pitch me on it, and he is gonna tell me what's wrong with a traditional concrete inbound pool, which I did way before I knew Marcus. Um, but this is kind of where we're heading, right? Because we're gonna look back and we're gonna say, do you remember when we had to make a choice between thousands and millions? Do you remember they used to tell us, Marcus, how many responses? That's right. 12. 8 million. Yes, That's exactly right. And it's gonna, it's gonna feel very, very antiquated. Humans always move towards the three Fs. One, is it faster? Two, is it more friction free? Three, will it eliminate fear? So those are really the three F's of innovation. If you just look across the board, and if you're like, Hey, well, I like, how do you predict so many things? How can I predict things in the fu? Just look at what's gonna be faster, what's gonna be more friction free and what's gonna help eliminate fear. It's exactly where AI is headed, but AI realizes it, it has had this problem of hallucinating, it's people thinking, oh, that it gives me bad information. So every single evolution of AI and the answers you're getting is built on, hey, it wants to give you an accurate answer. It wants it to be true, right. It wants you to trust it like you would the greatest assistant and greatest friend in the world. Uh, Marcus, what happens when your business does not show up in the AI results Today? You might not really feel it tomorrow. You're gonna really feel it in a year. You're gonna say what happened to it all? Because the other problems of this, Mike, is this, what happens, and this is, there's plenty of debate on this, but what happens when paid ads just aren't a play any longer? So many businesses depend on Google ads to drive the majority of their business right now. So if everybody is shifting over to a world where, okay, I see this screen and I've got the AI summary sponsored results, and then I've got the other, all the other blue links, when we shift from that to just give me the answer, people aren't realizing this dramatically affects how the world is consuming paid ads. Now, of course, Google is trying to protect that $300 billion a year business. Yes, but we've been spoiled now for the better part of four years where we're not really seeing ads. And yes, there is debate as to are they going to inject ads into them or not. But my sense is, and I don't know how you feel about this, Mike, but my sense is that probably the one that wins is, is where you pay a subscription and you're not seeing any ads. And I think the majority of people are gonna end up going that route because that's what they're gonna want. Again, faster friction, free, less fear. Okay? But to the question, if we do not show up, you're screwed. Ai, You're in big trouble. You will, you will have a major lead problem, which means you don't generate enough customers, revenue in your left saying, I don't understand. We were so good 10 years ago, Folks, Marcus is issuing, and I'm issuing a clarion call to you. If your business right now relies on the traditional search and paid acquisition on those channels, you have to come up with a plan because I believe it's true. And you know, at Social Media Marketing World, a couple years ago, I asked people to raise their hands. I think it was actually within, within like a month, a year and a couple of months. And like half the audience was no, a third of the audience was already choosing then to go to chat GPT over, uh, Google to get answers to questions. And you know, tomorrow we don't know if it's gonna be Gemini or it's going to be clawed chat GPT. It kind of doesn't matter or grok. What matters is that consumer behavior is actually shifting. And when consumer behavior shifts, we as marketers need to pay attention. So Marcus, what in the world, like where do we even start? How do we prepare for this?

Yeah, the easiest way that you can look at AI visibility and how do I get AI to love me and to recommend me comes down to what we refer to as trust signals. And this goes back to why I started the company, ai trust signals. com. What we've found is that there's very specific, again, signals that AI uses to say thumbs up or thumbs down a trust signal. Is any piece of content ever produced online about your company by you or by someone else? So for example, every single review ever written about your company by someone positive or negative, is a trust signal. And if you look at your, your, your trust score, it's like a tr it's like a credit score, Mike. So there's things that ding your credit and there's things that build your credit in the world of finance, right? Well, it's the same thing with how AI is viewing your brand. So every piece of content you produce, every article on your website, right? Every video that's out there, uh, the different tools that you have, and again, everything that is set about you, these become trust signals. And AI is getting much better at consuming all of them. So all the things, whether it's on social, whether it's on the YouTube, whether it's on your website, these are all becoming signals, but there are certain signals that matter more than others. Okay? So we're gonna get into those signals. But before we do that, I wanna set some foundation work. There are a lot of people out there claiming that they can get you ranked quote unquote in ai. And I want you to talk about that a little bit. You know, there, there's phrases tricky. We, there's phrases like AI optimization. I mean, there's a bazillion of 'em, right? Yeah. And I don't think they're necessarily, listen, necessarily bad, but there is no such thing as they're using the word ranked because that's what we're used to. But that's not how AI does it. AI is not ranking anyone. They, they see your brand as having an authority score on this particular subject matter or this particular area. And then you're likely to be mentioned there. Now, are there specific things that you can do that very much increase the likelihood that when somebody does a specific search, that you are within the answer? Well, yes, there are ways that you can do that. The problem is, it is gonna become more difficult over the course of time to, for you alone to manipulate the way that AI perceives you. 'cause there's a lot of things that are going on here. And this is, again, this is where it's, so this is, this is why when people say SEO and a EO or whatever you wanna call it, all right? I don't care what you call it. When there's this group of people that say it's the exact same thing, I'm like, no, you're crazy. That is not, it is not, this is not SEO this is different. And we could go on about that, but this is a different game than many people are used to. Well, and I want you to talk about how like, literally diverse the, the answers are with ai. Like, just address that a little bit because Yes, every account is different. Your account is different than me. So you and I could do the exact same search right now, Michael, online, we could say, you know, um, who is the best roofing company in, uh, Nashville, Tennessee, right? You could get one answer and I could get a different answer. It's not going to be the same answer. And it's because you and I are different people. It's been trained, your AI has been trained on you, mine me. It understands us differently. So when somebody says you're gonna rank first every single time and ai, that's actually not true. It's not what works, because it's gonna depend very much on the person. Lemme give you an example of this. It's gonna get to the point where the AI knows very definitively, let's say if you're a high-end, very quality driven buyer versus if you're a budget minded buyer, your AI will learn that about you, and therefore it's gonna recommend roofers consistent with your buying history. The themes of the past. Google never did that. That's, that's not what they did whatsoever. This is just one little example. So it changes from person to person. The results do. Yeah. And I wanna kind of give my social, uh, media folks some context. You can pull up Instagram or Facebook, and you all know you're gonna see a completely different feed than what I see, because they've got algorithms that understand a lot about your behavior. They've been tracking every little thing you've ever done, right? They've been reading it. They look at what you thumbs up, what you thumbs down. Now, when we go to ai, AI has its large language model which understands everything, right? It's scraped the whole darn world. But then as you start using all of these models, uh, these models have memory. And that memory is teaching them about what it is you're interested or not interested in. And they're learning based on the queries that you do inside of this. Um, you know, kind of who you are. And, you know, hypothetically, somebody could create a new chat GPT account and just start from scratch and see what kind of results come in.

But nobody is starting there except for one time, the very first time. And as a I learned about you, it's radically changing. Therefore, the answers, the way it positions it, all those things are gonna change. Well, To this Mike, a lot of times I'll talk to companies about visibility and ai and they're like, yeah, I'm, I'm showing up in AI right now. I'm like, really? Are you turning your search history off? Because what they're doing is they're using their existing account, and when they use their existing account, it's gonna be a bias towards, ideally for them mentioning their company. So if the roofer says, so who are the best roofers in Nashville? And they live in Nashville, the AI Nashville is gonna say, well, you're included in this list and these other companies. But that's not what the rest of the world is going to see. If you want to get a general sense for your visibility out there, the easiest way to do this is either a, you have a separate account chat, GBT account or Gemini, whatever it is that you use that does not have any of your history. It's not been trained on you. So essentially naked, right? And so it's just using bare bones, or there's a way that you can go within your chat GBT account and you can change it to turn it off. You can just to it off when you're trying to do that search so that it's not biased towards you, it's not using your search history at that point, that all the training, and then you can click it back so that it goes back to knowing you as soon as it's done that particular, you know, query. And the problem with that is it's only gonna work for chatt PT and you gotta remember that Gemini is a big deal. It's growing. You also have to remember that there's Microsoft copilot, you know, just like you've got all these different AI models that everybody is using, depending on what their rule is. Okay? So, so far here's what we know. We know that AI is gonna shift, um, the way people discover information. We also know that AI is going to, um, either know your business or not know your business, recommend or not recommend your business. And you've introduced the concept of a trust signal. Yes. And a trust signal, according to what I heard you say, is, um, information that the AI has accumulated about you, your business based on everything that's out there on the internet, every article you've ever written, sometimes the stuff you posted on social, uh, also, um, reviews, right? All the info, YouTube videos, everything. Probably podcast episodes. You've been on all these things, right? All that information these models have access to. And for the record, some of these models are multimodal. So like Gemini can watch and listen other, They're all gonna be mul multimodal if they're not today, it's, which Is really good news for those of us that are in the world of podcasting, right? So, um, okay, so now we're at getting to the point where we're gonna like, let's explore what the heck. Like, all right, we've introduced a concept of a trust signal. Yep. We kind of understand it conceptually, because if I'm hearing you correctly, kind of the internet has been built on these signals all along, right? Has Yes. Google decides to show you or not show you, and it's a similar concept. So, um, let's kind of talk a little bit about, like, these trust signals and let's dive in on them. Yeah, Let's, let's break 'em into categories. We're not gonna name them all. Um, at AI trust signals, you can read about all of them there and, and get to know any other, they're not all there, but they're, many of them are there. 'cause the tool measures it, it's ai trust signals. com is where you can find it. But there's three, uh, types of signals. The first one are technical signals that AI uses to, to either recommend or reject. The second are authority based signals, trying to understand what your brand's authority is in the market. And then, uh, the third are specific brand based signals. And I can give you an example of each one. We can just do one of each. I think Mike, start With technical and let's like a lead. Now this one's a little bit nerdy, but the frustrating thing for marketers for technical is one of the biggest components of AI getting what it wants is through what's known as schema or advanced schema on websites. And this is a new world for many of us. I didn't know what Schema was, I don't think like two years ago, Mike. I don't, I don't know about you, but it just I've known. Yeah, I've known. No, Just Yeah, of course you're saying that you found that last week. I'm just kidding. Audience. Well, SMA the schema is just, is basically some code that you inject on your website. It's, Describe it, it's labeling Yeah. For the back end, so that AI can very easily understand what it is that you are talking about, you're showing. So for example, if you have, and we'll talk about this like a cost page of your site, there should be, there should be schema, uh, behind that. Uh, another example, a big signal that needs schema to do it right, is content freshness. This is, has to do with your authority, but with content freshness, you know how you're starting to see more often, Michael, you have an article on the page

and it says, last updated on such and such. Well, that now needs to be required. So every piece of content you have needs to have a last updated on it. So if you go to the HubSpot site right now, you'll see this on every single article they have. But here's the thing, if you just do it on the front end, what the viewer's seeing, and you don't do it with schema, it's not perceived the same way. So you actually need schema that shows when that particular article was last, or a piece of content was last updated. So there's schema for FAQs, you should have that. There's schema for reviews. And to make a long story short, Even for pro, even for variations of products and stuff like that, correct? Yeah. Correct. And so for those who are like, well, how in the world, like, I don't even know where to get started on the schema. Well, what, what you can always do is you can, you can take a piece of content for your site and you can say, you can take all the code that created that page. You can put it into an LLM, and you can say, act as an expert in schema for AI visibility. I want you to check this page to make sure it's fully optimized for ai. What schema am I missing, if any? And then it can tell you, oh, I found this. Here's the issue. Here's what you wanna fix. Okay. So Are you just putting the, you copying the HTML into it, or are you actually the link? That's exactly What we'll do. Yeah. We'll, we'll put it in there and then it'll tell you what's schema, that that's a more Sure bet than if you just do the front facing, um, it's, it's hard. Explain why this is, is important. Like, I just want people to grab grok that part of it. Well, I don't, here's the, here's the problem. I actually don't think it should be important, because I would like to, to think that the AI could do everything with what's front facing, but it can't yet, at least not the way that it wants to, because AI fundamentally, what it does is parse information. It's the master parser. Because if you're gonna see like, like thousands and thousands of website in an instant, you're actually not reading every single word. You're parsing it. That's the way that it works. And so, in order for it to parse things very, very quickly, the key to that is schema is what allows it to see the label very clearly. Okay, we've got an FEQ here, we've got a costing here. And because it sees the label, it goes into it further and it grabs it during the parse. That's why this matters so much. I don't know, though, if it's gonna matter in a year or two, Mike, but it matters a lot today. That's the thing about these trust signals. They are evolving, they're changing. Well, and I will say it is invisible data that you cannot get if you're just reading it. Okay? It's, it's data that is designed to help, um, you know, bots when they crawl your website. Yeah. So therefore, it's important. I will throw one other thing out there. I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but a lot of people use CloudFlare on the front end of their website, and CloudFlare has the ability to block ai. I don't think that's wise, because if AI can't ingest your stuff, you're in trouble. What's your thoughts on that? Yeah, I, I actually have pretty strong opinions about this. You know, do you remember when like AI was getting trained on all those books and was trained on some of your books? It was, oh, yeah. My books, right? Yeah. I know a lot of people were really bothered by that. I, I wasn't bothered at all. I wrote those books so that it would improve the world. And I was pretty happy that ai, um, was trained on. It also goes, who the heck? You're, and it added to your authority. That's Correct. And, and it helps my trust. It's like a major trust signal for me, right? And so point being is I'm not trying to block AI for the most part with anything, unless it's very, very private information, right? Uh, like a company customer specific. But otherwise, I want my stuff to be consumed by ai no different than I wanted it be to be consumed by Google back in the day. I want it to be consumed by AI today. I think that's gonna be very important. I don't know why anybody would do that, frankly. Well, and specifically, um, if you believe what Marcus and I are hypothesizing from the top of the show, that, um, the future is going to be, people are going to start with AI to make decisions or do research. If you do not have that data, uh, they don't have that data in their LLM because you blocked it, well, then it's like you're, you don't, you don't exist, right? So on the trust signals thing, anything else we wanna talk? Yes. We Gotta hit two more real quick. Okay. We got, because these are the most important, the two most important one falls under brand one falls, falls under authority. Okay? The biggest one for brand, and this is the number one trust signal. It's actually battling for number one with another one. I'm gonna tell you here in a second. So Wait, we're done with technical and we moved on to brand. I just wanna be clear. Yeah. Let's, let's go to brand. All right, let's do one under brand. One of the most fundamental under brand is reviews. But here's the thing about reviews. What's interesting about reviews, and everybody keep in mind, like for years Google has said reviews was important, but guess what? Google didn't do. Google didn't read the reviews to decide whether or not they recommended a company that wasn't part of the algorithm. It's not how it worked. Whereas what AI does, it reads the review and that dictates who they recommend, who they reject. So in this context, there's four major factors that dictate how an AI sees a review. Number one, average rating, it's always been

always probably will be number two, how many reviews you have, review volume, they're looking at that. So if you don't have enough reviews, they're gonna ding you. Number three, they're looking at review recency quite a bit. And so they really wanna pay attention to things like, Hey, have they got enough reviews recently? Has it fallen off? If it's fallen off, that's a ding against your trust score. Again, they're looking at it like you and I would as a human look at it. And finally, the fourth component of reviews, they're really obsessed with negative reviews. Google doesn't weigh negative reviews when they show a blue link and their legacy search, whereas AI very much is looking at the whole spectrum of reviews. And because of that, they're building what could be essentially be known as a reputation graph of the brand. And the before I said there's actually more than that, but as they look at that entire reputation graph, now they're able to say much better than traditionally we've been able to get. Because traditionally it's like, okay, this one had the most reviews, they must be the best. Whereas now they're giving you the full reputation graph and making a much more solid recommendation based on you individually. Marcus, where do you think they're pulling these reviews from? Well, here's what's interesting about it. Some of the reviews are blocked. Like for example, uh, OpenAI chat, GBT doesn't have access to Google reviews API. So what it can do is it can see some surface level reviews on, for like Google reviews, but it can see all your Google reviews. But it's going to every other platform where it can get it. Now here's the hack behind this, and this is where you can help rank for visibility. Although it's not ranking, you can increase your visibility and your trust score. And the way you do this is you create a specific page of your website that shows reviews across different platforms. So assume for a second what happens if AI can't see all my Google reviews. Well, what you should do is you should put a handful of those Google reviews on your review page of your website. You should do it for your Facebook reviews, nextdoor reviews. You should do it for your Yelp reviews. Any place where your company has reviews, you wanna take those and you wanna put them on a very robust review page for your website. So this now helps the AI who couldn't see everything within your Google reviews because of that issue with the API, now they can see it on your site, and it makes a very big difference in terms of your trust score. Now this is interesting because obviously you've got different companies blocking, like Google is a danger player in ai, and the good news is they got access to all these reviews. And um, Amazon is a major investor inside of Claude. So they have access to everything on Amazon. Uh, Amazon's about to do a really big deal with open ai. Um, so I'm sure that that's gonna, that's gonna get into chat GBT, right? So this is gonna be a little bit of a, you try to get reviews everywhere for everyone kind of a thing, right? Because it's gonna be such an important signal, right? That's correct. And this is why you don't wanna just leave it in the hands of the AI to collect all your, your reviews for you. You want one hub on, on your site that highlights every platform and a bunch of the reviews from that platform. So that is the best, uh, trust signal you can use to improve brand signal right now. So that's a, that's a major one. Is There a tool that brings 'em together that kind of clicks? 'cause the AI's gonna know that those reviews are on your website, and they're not gonna be as high, highly, highly credible as if they were on an actual review site, presumably, right? Well, not, well, not necessarily Mike, because if you show it the right way, with the right schema and you, you visually show it just like they did it, and you link back to the platform that you're talking about. So you wanna link back to your Facebook page, Google reviews Ah-huh. By doing those things, it's seeing it like that. And we've, we've tested this. It is very, very effective. It's quite powerful. And, uh, AI is dying to see all your reviews as much as possible to make a solid recommendation. Best thing you can do is create this very robust review page on your site. Okay. So, so far we've talked about a technical side of things and we, we talked about Schema and I threw in there, uh, CloudFlare. Yeah. We talked about brands and we've talked about reviews. Can you just expand a little bit more on what you mean by brand? Is it more than just reviews or is it just reviews? Because I would imagine it might also include the totality of all the content that you've produced. I don't know. What's your thoughts on that? Oh, yeah, I mean, we're, there's, let me, let me give you an, uh, and sometimes brand and authority, uh, overlap to agree with this. Yeah. But let me, let me just give you a another one that is a, is a big one, industry awards and, uh, recognition. Okay? So ai, if you notice, when they're recommending a company, they will almost always cite an award

or recognition that they have received before. Okay, there you Go. Huge signal. So this is why, just like we want to now as marketers create a review page, you wanna create a very robust industry awards and recognition page. And what you wanna do is you want to take every award that you've won, either you as a company or employees on your team. So team members, and I mean, you want to dig Mike, I mean, you really want to, you, you wanna dig deep, you wanna show the award, you wanna link back to explain the award, and you wanna explain also what that award means in terms of the customer, buyer. And so if you do this quickly, you're gonna start to notice, like it happens fast too. This is what's so wild about this, because whereas legacy Google indexes AI is real time. This is not an indexing. This is a real time. Like what's out there right now for me to recommend to this particular person. And so now, as soon as you do this, all the, any changes that we're talking about today, it could impact people like the second that it's up on your site index, not needed. That's so cool. That's what's possible. And so you want to create a really robust industry awards and recognition page as well. Okay? What I love about this is, this reminds me of Robert Chelini, who I've had on the show a couple times, author of influence. He has got a concept called social proof. And these things influence humans too. This is really important for people to get their mind around, right? When you have reviews and you have industry authorities that, uh, grant a award to you, this is signaling to humans that this is someone important, right? But, and AI has been built by humans. So AI is effectively modeling what human behavior is, which is looking for social proof. Um, I don't know. That's just me throwing that out there. So, Well, it is, and if you took, if you took what AI cares about and you put it in a, in a circle, let's say, and those are the things that AI cares about most, to trust you. And then you take what humans care about most and you put them in a circle, those circles are absolutely merging together, Michael. I mean, that's definitively what we're seeing. In fact. Um, this next one, the one that I want to land on here, this is becoming along with reviews. This is becoming the number one signal, and this one falls under authority. Can I talk about it? Yeah, go for It. And people that know me are gonna think this is biased, but nope. This is what the, this is what the record shows quickly, what has become the number one or one A or one B trust signal out there is pricing transparency online. There is a major development here. Perfect case in point, something major happened in the last week, Mike. If you go online right now, let's say you living in Nashville, and if you type in, um, uh, roofers near me, now immediately under the Google search bar, you see a little call to action circle that says online estimate. Oh, so it's, it's automagically calculated. What it's doing is you, once you click on it, and I don't even know if you can do this on a, on a separate window right now, Mike, but anybody's listen to this. I want you to do that. choose, uh, some type of home service near you and say, you know, uh, roofer near me, window cleaner near me, whatever. You'll see this immediately left side. You'll see a little circle that says online estimate. You click on the online estimate, then it shows you another search results page. Now it's gonna show you one of two things. It's either gonna show you the companies that are using Google paid ads as a sponsor that have a calculator, an estimator on their website, or it's going to show you in the AI summary, it's gonna tell you what contractors near you, it thinks has an estimator on their site based on what it was able to see and read. Okay? Yeah. I don't see it yet, but I'm sure it's coming. It's probably So, yeah. Yeah, yeah. If you're searching this right now, like if you're searching, you're gonna see this very quickly. Also, many of you have already noticed, 'cause it's, this one's a few weeks old, old you're seeing on your cell phones. Now, when you do any type of service-based search, you'll, you're seeing AI have AI check prices, okay? Have AI check prices. As soon as you click on that, like if you do a search on your cell phones, it says have AI check prices, you click it, it asks you a series of questions, and then the AI goes to the contractor and the AI gets that information from the contractor and comes back and you get a report and you never engage the contractor. So what's happening here? AI understands that the foremost question every single consumer buyer has is roughly first question of the buyer's journey. First question, roughly, what's this gonna cost? And so now what we have seen definitively is you need a robust pricing page

that explains value in your industry. What drives cost up, what drives cost down. Talk about RY, things like that. You need a pricing page. video, and you need a pricing estimator. And here's where it gets most interesting in the near future, you will be especially is starting with home improvement. And it's moving, like I said, it's B2C, home services, home improvement, and it's moving out right now. What you're gonna see is you're going to see that any company that's service-based, that's not giving really solid at a minimum ranges as to what people will spend. I'm not saying, by the way, I'm not saying give, quote, exact quotes here. What I'm saying is you gotta, you gotta give estimates because if you don't do it, you will definitively be rejected by ai. You will not be the one that's recommended. Now, it gets worse when it becomes very agentic, the search. And you as a consumer are telling your AI agent, I want you to go find me three of the best contractors for my new roof. And then it's coming back to you and it says, well, I was only able to find two locally that was enabled me to get a real time estimate. Which one would you like me to reach out to, to set up the, you know, to set up them coming to the house? Like, that's our future, right? And so because of this, it has quickly become the fundamental trust signal. And uh, it's wild. 'cause I didn't expect it. But we've run at this point, 4,000 trust signals, uh, tests for different websites around the world. And pricing is just, it has become number one A is, that's it. I don't care if you're B2B, B2C man is where we're all headed, Okay? So, um, totally understand that, and it makes logical sense, right? Because the AI's objective is to try to help you make a decision, um, And give an answer. It can't give an answer if you don't have an answer, right? That's the, that's the big problem, Len, Can you give an answer? If you don't, if it doesn't have your information, it can't recommend you, right? Correct. Answerability is such a huge deal. So it's no different than in the past. People might've said, okay, I'm talking about cost and price, but I'm not giving ranges that might've worked before. From an SEO perspective, guess what? That does not work with ai. AI laughs at that and says, eh, rejected. That's a ding on your trust score. Okay? So how does this speak to authority? Because you, you know, we've talked about, uh, there's three trucks, trust signals. Yep. Technical authority and brand mm-hmm. Technical Authority and brand. We spent some time on technical, a lot on brand. How does this fall under authority? Like, help me understand, because What the AI wants to know, it wants to know you are who you say you are, and you're an expert in those things. Uh, this is why also, not to digress, but if you have an article on your site right now, you have to have a byline that goes to the author page. Way more important than it used to be. Because if you have two pieces of content that are similar, one has an author byline that takes it to the author page that shows the author and his, or her, let's say, training, certifications, expertise, et cetera, versus one that does not guess what the AI is going to recommend the company, or it's gonna source the piece of content that has the author page tied to that particular piece of content. So, once again, authority, it wants to know it's giving good, accurate, solid information. So this is why when you have a robust pricing page, when you talk about what drives cost up and down, and why some companies are expensive, cheap, it's like they're willing to talk about something that every buyer wants to know, but most of these companies don't wanna talk about. Therefore, I see them as an authority. And oh, by the way, the person that produced it, they've been in the industry for 20 years, they've got 10 certifications, they've won this and that award. I totally love this company. Boom. Give them the referral, give them the source, whatever it is. Okay, let's talk about, um, companies that are not like local service based companies. I know that's a big area that your focus is, but there's also, It's easy for people to understand as I Explain, well, I totally understand, but let's talk about some other authority signals for those that maybe don't do estimates. You know what I mean? Maybe they're, um, show Me somebody that doesn't do estimates. Okay, well maybe they sell a physical product, that's one option. Okay, well, But if it's a physical product, well, once again, there's different degrees of physical products, right? And so within those, there's ranges and somebody, so, so therefore somebody, you know, might say, you know, how much does it cost for a new pair of tennis shoes? It's like, once again, it actually becomes a similar, uh, a similar process. Okay? Now, now granted, if You're, lemme pick a different example, then lemme pick a better one, okay? Let's say that you're, uh, a coach or consultant. Yes, you're probably gonna need to scope out the project. Um, but how can we establish that authority? Because that is, you know, there's a lot of people that are selling, um, their time, they're selling their knowledge. Um, how can they establish authority?

Uh, I know that they could obviously have an estimator, makes total sense. They might already have packages that are on their website. Um, and revealing the pricing makes total sense. Like I think you've covered that extensively in your book. They ask you answer, but I'm just curious if there's other authority signals that the AI cares about outside of pricing. Oh, of Course. And I'm curious if we could explore those. 'cause um, in a world where there's, you know, um, millions of coaches or thousands of this or that, like how can, how can those of us that maybe are selling experiences or like, you know, events or whatever, like how, what are other authority signals that we could use? You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And sometimes just depends on the LLM. Um, some of these are, let's call 'em helpful. Some 'em are less helpful. For example, one authority, uh, one, one big trust signal right now that helps measure your authority is, are you on Google page one for that particular thing? Hmm. Um, but that's not like, oh, I can't scope fix that right now. I can't necessarily do anything about that, uh, per se. Another that, uh, affects authority is, uh, and this is a big trust signal, is what's what we refer to as accuracy of claims. So in other words, AI is really funny about if you say, you know, I am, I am the most, uh, you know, successful coach, um, for, uh, retired, uh, for, for stay at home moms that are coming back into the workforce. That's my thing. And I'm one of the most successful in the world. AI doesn't really like that unless it comes with proof, right? So it will deem you if you have a claim that is not backed by some type of proof that would help the customer. Whereas if you say, uh, in 20, you know, in 2023, um, I won this particular award for top 10 coaches in the world for this particular niche, and then you source back to it, that is an authoritative outbound citation, which is a major trust signal that helps prove the accuracy of the claim. So as you're going about the way you do your messaging today, you have to say, well, I just can't necessarily just bloviate and expect for it to believe me because it will actually verify the things that you're saying about yourself or about your company. So what you can do there is say, how many verifications can I put on my site to make sure that it's abundantly clear that I'm an expert at this thing? And this is why we said things like the, uh, industry awards and recognition. Also, any training that you've ever had, you should have a page on like specific types of like training that you've had and how that applies. But you always wanna bring it back to the customer and what it means to them. Now, does a human appreciate this? Yes. But AI is the thing that really, really likes it because you're mitigating its risk every time you have that additional citation, every time you show that additional recognition and say why that thing you're saying was true. So be very aware of accuracy of, of claims. Marcus, you and I are both writers. We used to call ourselves bloggers, um, and there are people out there that are YouTube creators, you know, video creators that are consistently showing up and writing content that's designed to establish their authority. Does that information matter to ai? Yes. Should we continue to do it if for nothing more than the train, the LLM that you are the authority? You know, we, we actually have, uh, we've absolutely seen that to be the case. It, we call that one of the trust signals that we measure is what's called content surface area, Mike. So content surface area, it's like, okay, do they just talk about this one subject like one time on their website, or do they talk about it 20 different times on their site and oh, they've got 15 videos on YouTube about it, and oh, they're, you know, they've got this medium account if that still exists, and oh, they're over here at this, you know, this other platform, whatever that thing might be. LinkedIn. Yeah, Certainly LinkedIn is, is one that, you know, they're, they're looking at. So content surface area major, uh, trust signal, and you as a brand individually or collectively as a company wants to increase your content surface area. You shouldn't have all your eggs in one single basket because that's actually a ding against your trust score. Because now it's saying, alright, you, well, you're, you're good on LinkedIn, but you kind of like, I can't find you anywhere else, so that hurts me. Whereas I have these, uh, three other people I could recommend, but I'm seeing them across five different platforms. I'm gonna recommend them instead of you because of it. You are now rejected. Unfortunately, doesn't mean you're not great, it just means your constant surface area is not where it needs to be. That's a major authority signal right there. Uh, Mike

Okay, so I want you to wrap this up by explaining what is possible down the road if people can gra gr grab whatever the frick the word is. You know, if people can grasp this concept and they can take this seriously right now as we're recording this in very late 2025, publishing this in early 2026, what is the opportunity for everyone who's listening right now? The opportunity right now is that many companies, and certainly many marketers, are still shockingly just neglecting AI visibility. They're saying Google's not really gonna change. It's always gonna be here just like it is today. They're not thinking like AI is thinking, they're not seeing the hundreds of thousands of people that are transitioning every day from what is legacy search to modern AI based searched. You have a window whereby the majority of your competitors are not sitting there thinking about things like, you know, uh, schema. They're not thinking about or worried about a pricing estimator because they're like, you know, uh, nobody really has that in my industry, so why should I worry about that? They're not paying attention to having a review page on their website because, uh, they can get the reviews by going to Google. See if they're not thinking that way. You can think that way. Therefore, you win the trust of the human, ai, you get recommended a lot more. You get rejected a lot less, and you're way ahead of the game when a hundred percent of the world has shifted over to a new way of finding the things they want online. I'm gonna say it's even bigger than this because if AI continuously recommends you, and the whole world is using AI to seek, uh, experts, businesses that do this thing, this is way better than showing up number one on Google search. Oh my gosh. I mean, it could be literally this, this is a business. Google stopped at the search result. This is huge. This transcends this. This is so big. This literally is going to make or break businesses down the road. I feel like it's stop. There's no question. And the problem is, like, you say that and people are like, ah, you just, you know, you're, you're kind of like just, uh, doom scrolling or whatever they call, I don't know what it is. Oh, I'm talking about the opportunities. I know, I know. But I'm saying it's like, like people will say, well, you're just saying if I don't do this, I'm gonna be left behind. It's like, would you rather me be dishonest? Yeah. And say you're gonna be just fine when we don't truly believe you're gonna be just fine. Because what we do understand is it's taking over the entire experience of learning and buying and shopping online, and it's gonna do so many more actions than we have ever done before AI for us. And so we can't even fathom it right now, because eventually it's gonna be returning back to the person with a full quote, a full estimate, everything's gonna be done, and it's even gonna be carrying out the contract with the company. And the, the human was just very, very slightly involved, just like an assistant would do for you today. That's what we're all gonna have access to. You cannot, like, there's no way that I can't, I just can't stress the importance of being aware of this and leaning into it and not saying, oh geez, I don't like ai. I think it's the end of the world. Because the fact of the matter is if this is worst case, and if this is like the matrix, I at least want my business to be successful between now and the time the Terminator comes. And the way that you're gonna be successful is by leaning into this and not saying, oh, Jay, I'm gonna be the ostrich with my head in the sand. I just don't believe that's the way Marcus Sheridan, uh, the Terminator is not coming if I have anything to do with it. Um, thank you so much for bringing your insights and wisdom. Ai trust signals. com is where you can check out, uh, his resource. And Marcus, if people are interested in, um, learning more about you and all the great things you've got going on, where do you wanna send them? Yeah, uh, I'm great on LinkedIn. Uh, connect with me there. Would love to, to be your friend there And marcus sheridan. com or email me, Marcus and marcus sheridan. com. Marcus, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. My pleasure.