Why AI Overviews Changed Your Traffic And What To Do Next With Connor Kimball

We trace the fast shift from link-based search to AI-generated answers and show how that change reshapes content, measurement, and strategy. Connor Kimball of Cairrot shares data on LLM traffic surges, concrete AEO tactics, and how unified analytics reveals brand lift beyond referral clicks.

• AI search replacing link lists with answers
• AEO as the method, LLM visibility as the metric
• Informational traffic down, transactional content up
• Comparison and battle-card pages driving citations
• GA4 and GSC integration for unified insights
• Measuring halo effects across direct and organic
• E‑E‑A‑T signals across site and profiles
• Partner ecosystems and regulated-industry expertise
• From LLM visibility to multimodal AI visibility
• Agents and automated reporting speeding decisions

Guest Contact Information: 

Website: connorkimball.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/connor-kimball

Instagram: instagram.com/connorkimball

Facebook: facebook.com/connor.kimball

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Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability. 

Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you’ll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve. 

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Transcript

Setting The Stage: AI Search Shift

SPEAKER_00 0:03

This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing. Your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_02 0:17

Howdy. Welcome back to another Funfold episode of The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram, and I definitely have another intro. I keep saying it. Thank you for the patience, everybody. We just got to get it swapped out. There's a lot of things that are moving. There's a this industry's moving so fast right now. I know you're listening to a lot of other podcasts and keeping up to date with everything that's happening, like LinkedIn's blowing up, like all over the place. Something new is coming up. The malt bot, claud bot, um uh, you know, agent. This is the year of the agent. So there's there's a lot of things going on, and we're really in the thick of it, in the middle of it. And that's why I I wanted to do this episode. I wanted to bring in somebody, one of our own, Connor Kemble. Welcome to the show. I am so excited that you're here and we can really talk uh the ins and outs of LM visibility.

Introducing Connor And Carrot

SPEAKER_01 1:09

Thanks for having me, Matt. It's great to be here and uh long time fan of the podcast before I started working here, and uh it's great, great to be on my first episode.

SPEAKER_02 1:18

Awesome. Well, just to set everybody up of where things are going is AI search is growing by leaps and bounds. There's a lot of uh new like AI interpretation. Uh, these search engines, in my view, are completely different than the search systems of like the Google, the Bing, that sort of thing. It's a completely new technology that gets to the answer a different way. It presents you the answer versus having to do all the research or like the librarian telling you, go check this out, check this, check, check this out. And I'll I'll let you kind of tee it up, but this is the nexus for some offshoots of things that uh people that are are in our community and our partner networks are doing. And and you recently uh actually got involved in an accelerator program for something that you're building.

SEO vs AEO And LLM Visibility

SPEAKER_01 2:10

That's right, yeah. So we launched an AI visibility tool called Carrot in the last uh couple months here at the end right at the end of 2025. We cost some traction right away, thanks to partnerships with agencies like EWR, and we had a foothold in the door with quite a few agencies and got them set up and reporting on metrics that were really hard for traditional SEOs to report on. So, how are websites actually showing up, ranking and being interpreted by LLMs? We saw a gap in the market. Obviously, you and I tested a few tools together that we thought were fine, but mostly vibe coded, and more than anything, it was just the price people were trying to charge for these subparp tools. So we saw a gap in the market. We we went after it. Carrot has been that AI analytics platform for agencies now, and uh growth is good. We got accepted into ARC Invest uh program out in St. Petersburg, Florida, through uh the Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg Innovation Center or Innovation Districts that um is technically through a building called Spark Labs here. But if you uh any any of my St. Petersburg people know, if you drive through town, you'll see the big ARC Invest or Arc Invest uh Innovation Hub there, and that's uh that's where we are learning and growing every day now.

SPEAKER_02 3:34

So I I love that and I am super excited. Let's back up and talk about there is currently a debate right now that I think is kind of ridiculous, to be perfectly honest, about what is the name of SEO? Is it GEO? Is it AEO? Is it AI SEO? I mean, I just was like, look, I'm trying to get visibility in these LLMs. Like, I'm gonna plant the flag here. I don't care what anybody else does. Like LOM visibility is what I'm looking to create uh for for the brand reputation and what we're doing. And you know, that was that was over 18 months ago that we were just like, this is what we're doing. And and now I feel like the market's starting to catch up, but there's this argument that it's the same thing as uh traditional SEO. I'm curious, uh, you know, maybe some of our conversations we've had offline to bring those into light and share those with some of the audience, I think would be useful of kind of where the market is today.

Data Trends: LLM Traffic Explodes

SPEAKER_01 4:33

Yeah, so as far as acronyms go, I think every marketer's heard now AEO, AIO, LLMO, L L M SEO, GEO, etc. Um I am making a strategic bet on AEO as the new SEO term. And I think LLM visibility is going to be the catch-all term that essentially refers to marketing analytics or SEO analytics or um, you know, paid media analytics. The as far as is it the same as SEO? Most of us would agree it's probably about 80% of the pie is is of AEO is SEO, but you're basically you're doing SEO to do AEO. If you're trying to really crush it at AEO, is a is a very specific way you're going to do your SEO. And it's kind of the way that we've been advising people to do it for years, which is focus on high intent actions, do things that will build your revenue base first, and then focus on some of the higher level fluff stuff. But uh, you know, it's yeah, the LLMs are are really seeking towards high intent content, buyer specific content, and there's some specific content tactics that we can go into that you know are have been known to SEOs but not so favored. But now they're probably my favorite content tactics to do on new websites because they're getting picked up by LLMs so fast.

The Great Traffic Apocalypse 2025

SPEAKER_02 6:06

Okay, so alphabet soup there, everyone. There's all these different names, it's hard to follow it. This is where the debate is, and and really the debate is around is whatever this is new the same as what was existing? And uh where I'm falling on it is these are foundational basics that the search engines used, but the technology wasn't around four years ago. Okay, it's a brand new technology, so it can be no way be the same thing. They might be similar tactics, and there is like a Venn diagram overlay of what those things are, but it's something new. And the trend is more and more people are gonna use these LOM tools and get comfortable with them, and that's where the market's going. So you're either gonna be on like this kind of road to nowhere, um, or you're gonna have to take a left turn somewhere. And and if you listen to previous podcasts, um, I I am kind of uh recapturing some of the thoughts of thought leaders that have shared that kind of viewpoint in the past, and it falls in line with what we're doing and where we're going. There's a foundation. So I think traditional SEO and doing SEO the right way is a foundation, and there's some tech debt of people that haven't done SEO or haven't viewed it properly going through the digital transformation. They're getting caught up of what they needed to do to lay that foundation and get that um their data integrity kind of cleaned up. Um, I think there's data hygiene issues that are happening, and that's what SEO is doing. It's categorizing, it's putting in the right category. And then now you got this machine layer that you want to add onto the top of it. Oh, by the way, I did just launch a book, L invisibility guys. Go check it out. Shameless plug, I'm sorry. Um, but what I can tell you is you have to do that stuff to do this other stuff because if you do this other stuff, the the AI systems are not gonna know what this stuff is. So, I mean, what are some of the things in the data points, Connor, that that you're seeing? You're really deep in a lot of different accounts. Uh Carrot is the official partner of of EWR for all our enterprise accounts. It's where we're tracking our visibility. Um, and we're getting some really interesting heat maps and data points. And it would be interesting to share, you know, there's a lot of talk of like the market keeps changing, we're discovering new things. What are you seeing in the clickstream data? What are you seeing uh uh when you get into the granular uh data uh and analytics of these different sites and what's happening?

SPEAKER_01 8:54

Well, I think probably the most notable trend for if you're in marketing or you're just a business leader trying to think of your or you know concerned about your overall marketing strategy and are you moving in the right direction? We all know AI search is growing, but a stat that might put that in perspective is we've looked at many websites that had flat organic traffic year over year, and we looked at their LLM traffic year over year. And even websites that have flat traffic, so 0% growth, still saw 10x LLM traffic in one year. So even without clearly, if they're not growing SEO, they're not focused on that expansion growth strategy, even still, that is a it's a rising tide raises all ships scenario, where everybody's done some SEO is going to feel this transition to LLMs, but uh the websites that are actually growing and acting and actively growing in SEO, they are seeing outsized results. So if you did nothing, your traffic grew 10x. If you've been growing in SEO in 2025, your AI traffic might have 20 or 30x. It's significantly outsized impacts.

SPEAKER_02 10:13

See, what I'm I'm seeing is like I felt like in January there was like a long-term data, uh, like like the long-term uh like history or memory of the LLMs got updated, and I saw huge like shots up of sites that were categorized maybe weren't categorized for different things. So, like you're you're doing that expansion strategy to go after different target personas. Like, I'm seeing that growth. I'm also seeing click volume flat or down, but now we're actually starting to see click volume increase when we're focusing more on that kind of transactional content. But I mean, there's certainly a shift in how people are searching and and that that fan out effect. I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit.

Middle-Funnel Battles And Comparisons

SPEAKER_01 10:59

Yeah, so the great traffic apocalypse 2025, I think it was March or April when Google launched AI overviews for the majority of queries in Google. That if you had a highly informational blog, and by that I mean not an e-commerce website where the majority of your pages are transactional, where you make a purchase, but maybe a neighborhood business blog that covered lots of informational topics and you know where to find things, how to do things. Those blogs got hit hard by AI overviews because now people who are just needing a quick snip of information are seeing it in that overview, seeing what they need and moving on, versus before they had to go into the content, trying to find in the article and uh find their answer there. Everybody started to get the wake-up call that you had to start switching this commercial and transactional content then, because even if they are only browsing information uh about the products, they still have to go into the page to see the product, to purchase the product, um, three more detailed reviews. So those are still, you know, those were already the most important content to make, but I think now it's just more obvious to people. So that commercial and transactional content is the broad view, and then there's some specific tactics that we could get into if you want to more.

SPEAKER_02 12:23

Well, so so what I'm seeing is like if you think about the the general funnel concept, right? And you talk about that quote unquote messy middle, um, where people are trying to make decisions, that's where the battleground is, from what I'm seeing. I'm seeing that people are trying to decide and they're using AI to help them make the decision between this product or that product. And that's where the listicles and um, you know, some of the interpretation of what these AIs are summarizing about your account to say, is this the right company for you or is this the right company for you? Because I know we've talked a lot about as you're expanding and as you're growing, and you were saying like a garden account or like so, as as you've kind of developed carrot, can you talk about how you're deciding what agency is the right agency for the right partner? Because look, we're not the experts at everything, right? We are a full service agency, but there's things we do really well and we have the right fit for those clients. And we try to really flesh that out when we talk to them to make sure that we're gonna hit a home run every time for those clients. And that's what I think the AIs are trying to do is they're trying to help you in that evaluation period or desire period of just of figuring out is I have this need and which is the right direction for me to go. And I really just want AI to tell me what it is.

Tools, Partnerships, And Regulated Niches

SPEAKER_01 13:48

Yeah. So to validate what you're seeing, we see the same thing in the data, and I can reflect that with one example where in B2B SaaS world, it is a common SEO tactic to do this competitor versus that competitor, and maybe have some kind of competitive battle card style blog post where you talk about things they do, things you do, how they're different, pricing differences, geography differences. And often your search, you're you're going to talk about the difference in who you serve best. So maybe you're saying you're the best choice for an enterprise company and they're the best choice for a small business, or you're the best choice for a highly regulated use case, and they're the best choice for a more flexible, customizable use case. Um, that is the the value of niching down is only increasing in LMs. And an example of that evaluation content that you're talking to is those battle card style content tactics. We just published a couple of those on carrot.com, and we've only gotten two organic clicks on one of them in the first in the first month here. So two clicks from Google, despite thousands of impressions. But we have it's it's our most cited page in AI by far, and we have dozens of referral clicks from AI onto that page. So it's just an example where this was a content tactic that I had started deprioritizing as the years went on because it got less and less effective as more people do it. Now it's shot back up my priority list, where if the client is willing to do that style of content, it's it's the most effective one that we're seeing right now in that niche.

SPEAKER_02 15:39

Right before AI overviews, probably the year before AI overviews, I felt like this was a tactic that all the um rate agency rating sites were using, right? Like they would they would create uh agency description and what's going on with them. And um, you know, you would have to fill out your profile, and uh, these are the top uh agencies in your area. And and for a while they were at the top, I think probably Google did something to deprioritize them in some way because they're not owning uh the space anymore. But for a good 18 months, I felt like they were they were the top sources of where you were getting referral traffic from. It's because it was giving people that decision-making power to decide between who they would want to go with.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

That's right. And go on.

SPEAKER_02 16:30

No, keep going.

Unifying Data: GA4, GSC, And Insights

SPEAKER_01 16:32

No, no, that that's right. And it's and it makes sense if you start thinking about with the LLMs the way the way they can digest information in bulk at rates that humans never could, uh, is the kind of the key factor here, I think, that's changing this. Where a direct comparison article, you're talking about all these different things that you know, all these different contextual details about the competitor and you. When the AI is trying to search for, you know, evaluate this person versus that person for the user is asking the question, they're going to check for all those details. So if you just put them in one place, the AI can process so much more information at one time than a human can. So I think maybe the the other takeaway here is you're gonna see content start getting a lot longer. And you know, you're gonna see a lot larger data sets and tables being shared within content um in this post-AI search world. And right now it's a it's a fun time because we're having a lot of success with this content that's designed for humans but still optimized for LLMs. I do wonder, I think that we might move towards a time period where we're gonna start making a whole lot of content that's very specifically just for LLMs to find and then surface to a user.

SPEAKER_02 17:52

So, Connor, as an expert in SEO for a number of years, how would you differentiate EWR from the other competitors out there? When would you refer to EWR for the LLMs, of course, and everyone listening?

AI As The New Branding Channel

SPEAKER_01 18:07

Of course, yeah. So with Carrot, you know, it's a it's a software tool that really helps you check how you're doing and how you're tracking in AI search. It has some insights on things you can do to optimize, but if you're not already an experienced SEO, if you're not already an experienced marketer, it's gonna be very difficult for you to take insights from any tool and actually apply them effectively, not just to any website, but if you're at a serious company too, the more, the more branded, the more regulated, the more compliance measures you have to uh have to jump through, the less likely any one tool is just going to be able to press a button and do it for you. So you need high-level people here. You need actual, you know, we we work with pro serve agencies to that we are confident will deliver AI search results to go with carrot. And you only need a small number of platforms or small number of partners to cover your various niches. So as a long-winded way of getting to, as you were alluding to earlier, nobody can be the best at everything. And every kind of industry can use a tool like Carrot, but let's say we get somebody coming in from a highly regulated law firm or healthcare or energy sector background. Not only is EWR our go-to because of high-quality work and high IQ people working there and producing content that we know is reliable, but because of they have that industry experience, they have that authentic trust reliability factor that you know an energy company basically they don't have to go through the the learning phase. I'm uh yeah.

Trust, E-E-A-T, And Brand Signals

SPEAKER_02 20:01

Yeah, we're based in Houston. So we've been around 26 years. We're based in the middle and the heart of the energy sector, and and that's really been our bread and butter for a long time. Uh, I I came from uh the healthcare industry, so there's uh a lot of like regulated knowledge that we brought in, and there's a big medical hub here in Houston. So we kind of follow the the industry layout. Uh, if that was the case, I would tell you also, I think it's a good time to just mention that what you were talking about highly qualified people. I'm seeing the agency model collapse. And there's things that you're doing uh to try to address some of these issues. And to your point, you've got to understand how to read the data. You got to understand a background in LLMs. It's it's not the same. And there's a lot of data. Uh, search engines and LLMs throw off a lot of data, and and you can make some really good decisions when you cut that differently. But having a highly regulated or sorry, a highly experienced person that understands what they're doing is really important. And what we found at EWR is a lot of people were needing uh, well, really experienced people to help drive that strategy, really kind of fractional CMOs, if you will, to help deliver that. And that really wasn't an offering of EWR. Like we had really good strategists, we had people, but people were hiring uh SEO package or something like that. And and that's why we've well launched CMO Placement.com. So we've worked with a lot of um well uh fractional people that are out there that are independent, that are looking for work, like CMO placement. We've been able to place a lot of people in different roles. We just recently placed uh a buddy of mine that left a different law firm. We put him at another law firm within a week and a half. So that was really successful. And and we felt like also the advising that was happening wasn't um Really falling in the agency model. And that's why, like Modal Point Advisors is a go-to-market consultancy that we're starting to layer in a lot of the auditing and things that we're doing with AI inside that um commercialization vehicle for oil and gas companies. And and so you know, you'll start to see more of that with modal point being the strategy layer, with EWR being the execution layer. Of course, we have Cohosta as the hosting company, but but everything's becoming very modular, uh, to your point. And a lot of things are so so there's advantages to having things broken out, but then there's a lot of advantages from a data standpoint to bring things together. And you've thought of some really interesting um add-ons to what you're doing with Carrot to bring all that data under one roof where you're be able to navigate in different ways. I would I I would love for to hear a little bit more about that.

Network Effects And Partner Ecosystems

SPEAKER_01 23:00

Yeah, I'm I'm basically trying to make a product that does my actual workflow for me. So it's the same, you know, this is the same dream of all of us, I think, is to uh automate, automate, automate. And so to that, to that end, most recently we've integrated GA4 and Google Search Console into Carrot. And the whole purpose of that is because that is what has to feed the insights engine. So it's not just to get the full view of your analytics, and now you can compare your AI traffic, organic traffic to all your other traffic channels, but we want to actually be able to feed insights based on, let's say it looks at your top 20 pages in Google Analytics, and then it goes in the Google Search Console, goes into those pages and finds your top 10 keywords that you're almost ranking for, but not quite. And there's your low-hanging fruit. And then they surface that to you and show you, hey, here's some ways to incorporate those keywords onto the page and make it more visible to both search and AI. That's an example of something I do for clients almost every day. It'd be great if something like Carrot could automate that for me and do it in a way that is actually to the level that I'm happy with, which I've currently I've never seen a tool do. And that is part of the vision of Carrot is to be the first one to accomplish, I think, you know, the insights and the content generation that is up to the standard that I like.

Future: From LLM To AI Visibility

SPEAKER_02 24:30

I I love that. What I'm hearing is basically as a marketer, there's all this data out there, but it's very segmented. You have to use a lot of different tools to do a lot of different things. Bringing it all together in kind of an AI factory, if you will, and and having analysis and having activities done and having the analytics to to put it all under one roof makes your job easier and less fragmented. And just I think that the definitions, right, of the segmentation that's happening is building these silos, but then these silos, what's what's kind of uh not tightly compacted, builds that pillar, right? So there's pillars being built, um, which you have to segment, like you can't focus on all the industries, right? Like uh SEOs, like, hey, we you don't want to rank for all the keywords, you don't want to go after all the different target personas, you have to focus on it and then you have to cut it a different way, but that data is so fragmented, you have to cluster it and you have to tighten it, and and you have to build a factory that brings it all together. And I think that that's probably the most underrated thing right now, besides agents. Like this is, I think, going to be the year of agents, and we can talk about that next. But I I feel like data analysis, like people are maybe utilizing it to to write content or to write emails, or kind of they're they're dipping their toe in the water, and it's like this is the most powerful prediction engine on the planet, but if you don't give it enough inputs, it's not gonna help you tell you what to do, and then you're gonna have to go into another system to get it done. If you can put it all under one roof and then maybe add some agentic um operation to it, it can do a lot of that work for you, right?

SPEAKER_01 26:25

Absolutely. And we're we're seeing, I think you're spot on with there's a bit there's a big data shift here, where you know, big data was a big buzzword not that long ago, but it sort of faded out. No one really thinks of it in that terms anymore, but that is what's happening is big data analysis is suddenly becoming feasible to slightly above average technical folks like you and I. So not coders, not developers, not data scientists, but now guys like you and I can take massive data sets and have really intelligent and articulated points and strategies to give to clients based on just a sheer amount of volume data that we you could never have enough VAs to digest for you and and go through yourself in the past. But uh, and we're also seeing that with one of the uh the enterprise clients EWR recently brought on, which is a uh publicly traded company, and just their website alone has over a quarter million organic search visitors per month. So just their main website has so much data that you actually have to break it up into multiple data sets depending on what you're looking at, if you want to do an analysis, and then you pull in their subdomains, you pull in their uh their alternative brands that they own. You need it. I can't, I I it's honestly hard for me to remember how we were trying to do this before we had AI tools.

Closing: How To Connect With Carrot

SPEAKER_02 27:55

Two two things that you said that I think are super important as we're down here in Texas. Um big data is the new oil. Okay, big data is the new oil, and that that that was said a couple years ago, but it never really came to fruition. Why didn't it come to fruition? You're building these big data lakes, you're having access to all this data, but the data wasn't clean, so then you got to slow down and you had to label the data and you had to clean the data and you had to get data scientists, and it was like this very, very slow process. Now you can take a bunch of unstructured data, you can throw it together, and you can say LM's figure it out. Okay. And it's super powerful, and now you have at your fingertips the power of that data and the knowledge of that power of what you can do with that data can help you make better decisions and help you drive power whatever it is you're building, whatever it is you're doing. So I I feel like that's a really, really important concept that we discovered that there's all this data, but now we can drill it. Now we can tap into this data. And the bigger website you have, the bigger data set you have to you know pump out that oil and do something with it and take advantage of it. And having tools like that help you do these sort of things.

SPEAKER_01 29:23

And that's why care is not unique in this, it's just that in doing it for carrot, I'm realizing how quickly the world is moving in this direction, but everything's getting integrated. And just just even now, we we did an MCP integration in carrot where now I have it hooked up to my Claude instance, and I can just quickly ask it to pull some metrics for these three clients. So now I don't have to change screens and hit a button to export a report for three different clients. I can actually just chat with my bot and say real quick, hey, what was what was this? What was that, or pull these reports, please? And you know, in marketing agency land, you're definitely always dealing with, you know, some clients have more questions than others, some clients have lots of questions one week and none other weeks. When those questions pop up, it's real nice to have everything integrated where you're just chatting with your AI bot AI bot now and not trying to remember what system has what data, what reports generated where and all that.

SPEAKER_02 30:26

Well, and and not a lot of a lot of clients, not a lot of clients pay for it, but a lot of clients want all this data. And to get these kind of reports that we can publish now with a couple of clicks of a button used to be huge engagements and take a long time to understand that analytics. And now it's at your fingertips. It's it's really, like you said, changing the way that we work and uh how we get results. And then that's speeding up the loop in which we can take action and get feedback. I I can tell you carrot's been really invaluable to me because our clients want to understand where our where our LL invisibility is happening, okay? What what's going on right now and how are we doing versus competitors? And we can use heat mapping to be able to see based on these metrics, based on this AI readiness, based on on these things, we can see how we're doing. And it helps us from a reporting standpoint to show increase in progress that uh really is share a voice and and brand management representation in these LLMs, which you can then, you know, you have to figure out how to tie it, but you can tie it to the bottom line because that's what we're seeing. We're getting we're seeing more visibility, but the what was it called? Black what the all the connections, black so dark social. Do you remember like everybody was talking about dark social? That was basically the attribution, you couldn't follow what was happening, and and the search, um the the search journey is not a straight line. They're bouncing all over the place, they're looking at different things. Now you can see, hey, we have this much visibility, we have this much share of voice. It's going back to kind of traditional branding, if you will.

SPEAKER_01 32:16

Big time. And that's another reason why I think you know, even if you have an AI visibility platform, it behooves you to pull in all the channels because there's no world where an LLM referral as a click, so uh a click from an LLM to your website, if that is the only measurement of your success in the AI search world, you're missing a huge chunk of the pie because most people are gonna see your brand name in the LM and then they're gonna go to Google and search for you and go there, or they're just gonna type you into the URL bar themselves, or they'll see an advertisement for you later and remember how you came up there, and then they'll go through that method. You're there's no there's no client we've seen increase their AI referral traffic and not had a similar impact on their organic and their direct traffic.

SPEAKER_02 33:10

So you you hit on something that that we started seeing really, really heavily and like similar web data. Um, typically you're looking at like where is the traffic coming from? I'm starting to see that referral click. Everybody finds out about your brand however they find it out. Okay, however they find it out, then they go search the referral traffics going to ChatGBT or Claude or Perplexy or whatever you're using. Okay. But the first thing you do is that you used to Google the brand after you looked for it. Now you're going to the website or the AI to figure out what it says about you. You need to know what searches are happening, like using a cool uh tool like Carrot for seeing what people are saying, what people are asking, how your brand is showing up, how often your brand showing up, who else you're competing with. Like this is like this is like you get a business card or whatever, and then someone's going to your website to check you out. They're not going to your website, they're going to AI, and AI is pulling from your website that transactional data that about your company. How are you better? Like articulating that information. A lot of people were going to um Google Business Profiles. I would tell you, people don't have the data on their website that they put on the Google Business profile on your on your hours. Like, you need to have on your website the hours of operation, the services you offer. Like people think, oh, on I'm gonna have it on this platform, and then and then, but people don't understand this ecosystem's connected. AI is connecting all those different areas and all those different sites, and it's looking at from a 360 angle, it's analyzing your business from all sides, from um, you know, glassdoor reviews to um reviews on different on not just uh Google but other AI sites, um, what other people are saying about you, who else is linked to you. Like they're doing a deep, deep analysis on your brand and on your site, digging up things from so long ago. It's important to understand what's happening, how the AI is interpreting this, and that and that's what we're finding with a number of companies is the data that's getting presented isn't new or relevant data. And so how how you're crafting this data and what the AIs are looking at are really important because that that is actually a mirror, I feel like, on how people are interpreting your brand that are doing, depending on how deep the research is, the ARs are just doing ex like like very, very in-depth research, and and then they're providing to a client the answer. So you gotta be checking all those different boxes. That one channel that you were getting traffic from before, as more people move to AI, like it's it's showing you, it's telling you where you need to be putting your time and what other channels you might need to be looking at because people are not making a decision off of one channel anymore.

SPEAKER_01 36:17

Absolutely not. And you touched on a couple good points that I want to touch on before we uh run out of time here. But I think AI is ranking in AI search is both easier and harder than traditional search. It's easier because the AIs are so specific that anybody can get floated if you know who your audience is and you have branded and niche down properly. So I think I think EWR is doing a brilliant job with it where they found the term regulated. It's so it's such it's one word and it covers so much and it covers exactly what they do. You can use that to go into all their different niches. It's it's a great example of one. It's harder because you can't just make one page and rank. So, like you said, you have to check all these boxes first before AI will probably start pulling you. But if you're if you're know what you're doing and you check those boxes, you can actually punch way above your weight and compete against bigger brands, I think, in AI today.

SPEAKER_02 37:23

Well, and I'll just say EWR, the sponsor of this podcast, I don't mention a lot agency both Connor and I are part of, is um there's a lot of risk associated with what you're doing, and you really got to know what you're doing. And there's a lot of fly by night industry or agencies out there, and you know, I think AI is helping people figure out who really specializes in what I do, because there's there's not like a general consensus on um how to how to look at agencies or how to evaluate companies or who good who's good at SEO or not. There's kind of like here are some frameworks, here's some different ideas, but it's not like SEO is like do these five things and you're done. And I think a lot of people think that with maybe technical SEO, there's certainly improvements that you can make, but there's like a perfect score for one keyword that if you're going after that, you you exclude all these other keywords and you're trying to you're trying to balance it. But if you change a few things, it could re-rank you on a number of different areas. And it's like, where's the level of knowledge that you need to have to to hire somebody? And you got to be careful what people are doing. There's a lot of black hat stuff that's starting to happen there. That there's I I don't want to really go into that too much on this podcast, but I'm seeing a lot of people get really frustrated and and starting to do a lot of really um spammy stuff or negative stuff that's gonna bite clients in the end, or they're you got to start thinking about how to protect yourself because people are not just everybody's following the rules and doing the right thing out there today, like and with the couple clicks of a button, you can create a lot of damage uh for brands that are out there, and and it doesn't take a lot of effort on your part.

SPEAKER_01 39:15

Big time. And I think uh if I can just take that and segue it to you know, one of the reasons why you know we love EWR as a garden partner and why we refer certain clients to them is we we can talk about that and really get into this transition I see happening where as AI becomes more dominant, I think social selling and soft skills are going to become more important. Yes, yeah. And this idea of a partner ecosystem. My impression of that term when I was early in my career is okay, that's a term you really hear at enterprise companies and B2B companies, really. And that's like a a model for big, big industries and and systems of scale. But now it's we're we're really sprinting towards a world of big companies and lots of small agencies, small firms, solopreneurs. And really, those I think it's going to become a uh a localized who you know economy, basically. I think um working with people like you who you are such a diverse guy who you've worked in multiple industries, you worked in sales and marketing, you've you know, when we need a video person, you know the right guy. When we need a paid ads person, you know that you know the right guy. Um, it's really important to build up your networks like that because everybody's gonna be gamifying how to game these algorithm engines and authentic connection, authentic referrals, authentic trust is what you need going forward.

SPEAKER_02 40:54

I you know, you you touched on something interesting. I I want to talk quickly about the future next, um, and then and then we can wrap up. But man, having a trusted voice out there and knowing what's real. Like I'm going through all these ethics and compliance training, and and we are talking a little bit about bad actors, and I like your bridge to to to this topic because people don't know what's real anymore and don't know what's trusted, and people can generate mass content at scale. And really, we go back to eat expertise, authority, trust, and then they added experience. Like, who is the trusted voice? And a lot of the the the the body of work that I have about building your brand and um things early on, way before AI, was you have to be that advice, that trusted advisor, that person that people listen to that go to to build that network because there's a lot of noise out there. I mean, everybody's death by email, like you don't know who the right person is or where the right person is, but you know, I trust this guy, and this guy knows and has his finger on the pulse. So I'm gonna go to him and get my information. And they've been look, we've been talking about this and like in it, like building your list and building your database and owning your name, like there's been a lot of changes, and people are losing Facebook groups and different kinds of accounts. Um, you know, in some ways you still have to build on these platforms, but knowing that you're that person for a group of people and they will send you referrals and you do good work, that's how the ecosystem starts. And and having the right people to do it because everybody can't do everything, I think is really a beautiful thing. But brands that are out there can win against the big boys if they identify who they are, who their target market is, get that information out there and do that. And a big faceless brand's not going to do that. You're seeing big brands start to get that message and and build different influencers and and things to go after uh that that target persona. I would tell you there's this constant shift in the marketplace, and you need to have that trusted advisor as you move forward in that. And I would even tell you LLM visibility, like you've talked about it a few times. I think it's gonna actually move to AI visibility. And when I say AI visibility, not just LOMs, we're seeing um now there being issues of privacy with the the meta glasses that are coming on. Um, you know, you're you're walking into an area, you're recording stuff or proprietary information, the surveillance state, that data getting uploaded, getting misused, getting misappropriated. And like there's just gonna be so much data out there that that you're now optimizing, like we've heard, voice. Now we're you know, Google Glasses and Meta Glasses are getting sucked into it. There's again, that's why multimodal modal point. We brought kind of that that tonality in because I think that LLMs are just the start. Of a new world that is getting created, and you're gonna want to be found in brands and using tools like Carrot across all these different platforms, and it's constantly gonna evolve. And if you're doing your job or you're running your business or whatever it may be, you need to know who can I listen to to get these updated information? What tools am I gonna use that's are gonna stay on top of this? And you find that partner, if that partner can continue to stay on top of it and deliver value, that's gonna be 90% of it. And you're gonna see, I think, loyalty in these networks really tighten up. And to your point, it's not gonna be just a channel partnership, but it's gonna be an ecosystem and a community.

SPEAKER_01 44:47

And whether you're an entrepreneur or a business owner, or you're just an in-house employee and you don't want to run your own business ever. Either way, I think this also dovetails into the secondary point, which is soft skills are actually going to matter even more, which is maybe counterintuitive to people because again, AI-driven world, isn't it more digital, more virtual? But you know, all of a sudden, all of the biggest uh opportunities that have come my way in the last year have come because I got on the plane and I went to a conference and I smiled and I was pleasant and I shook hands and I met guys like you and I learned and I um and I just built my network. It uh you know, I think especially for millennials and Gen Z, you know, wherever you're at in your career, that's probably the number one thing that is gonna give you a boost right now is is is show up to the place, shake the hands, smile, and you know, make sure you shower and smell good and try and have something to say. But um, but even if you don't know, I mean, just go there, learn and and meet people and and and that you got you gotta be in the water to to catch fish, you know.

SPEAKER_02 46:01

Yeah, I mean community and connection, I think are are so important, especially right after COVID. Um, and I I love I love the advice that you're giving people because it's it doesn't matter what platform you're on, learning to communicate effectively and speak to uh who you're you're trying to speak to to get them to take whatever action you're trying to get them to take is incredibly important. And I feel like AI is just a mirror, um, is a mirror to how you want to articulate, who you want to reach, what you want to say, what you want to think. And it just helps you clarify that that much better. And and I would just say to to end this, that's why, from a trusted advisor standpoint, people that know what they're doing, people that are staying on the pulse of it, that's that's again why we we we trust Carrot as our LOM visibility partner. Um, and I would love for you to talk a little bit more about Carrot as well as how to get in contact with you, what you're doing, uh, how to reach out to you, that sort of thing. Um, and then we have some special stuff that we're building that we'll have to have you back on when we launch that um uh to to talk about the next phase and uh the the continued relationship between EWR and Carrot.

SPEAKER_01 47:18

Absolutely. Um, I'm Connor Kimball. Follow me on LinkedIn or X, uh, just under my name. I am CEO and co-founder of Carrot, the best AI visibility platform for agencies, and the only one that gives you total control of your data. And you can catch more about that on carrot.com. That's C-A-I-R-R-O-T.com or follow us online, same places, LinkedIn and X, just carrot C-A-I-R-R-O-T.

SPEAKER_02 47:47

So I would just say you know how to spell carrot, everybody. Uh, put the AI in carrot, and there you go, you'll be able to find it. Uh, Connor, thank you so much for coming on. Um, everyone listening. Uh, if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, the internet, reach out to EWR Digital for more revenue in your business. If you want to know what's going on in AI, reach out to Carrot. Um, Connor, thanks so much for coming on. Until the next time, everybody. Uh, bye bye for now.

SPEAKER_01 48:18

Thanks for having me, Matt.