37% of Consumers Are Starting Searches on AI. Is Your Business Showing Up?

NOTE: This blog is a transcript from a podcast and therefore may contain errors.

Shannon Allen: Welcome to Digital Marketing ROI.

I’m Shannon Allen, your host, along with my co-host, Krystal. happy June, Krystal.

Krystal Vivian: Happy June. It’s crazy. It feels like this month has flown by. I know. But I was looking at the calendar. July is gonna be a really long month. Yes, it is. which is very nice and very… I love when July feels like

Shannon Allen: I’m on vacation.

I am taking two weeks vacation in July. Yay.

Krystal Vivian: Good for you. You need it. That’s good.

Shannon Allen: do.

Krystal Vivian: That’s a good thing.

Shannon Allen: I’m excited.

Krystal Vivian: I’m not taking any vacation, but I might take a Friday off here and there because it’s summer and it’s nice, but-

Shannon Allen: It’s nice to take those long weekends.

Krystal Vivian: Yeah …

Shannon Allen: a long weekend in the summer, especially

when we’re hitting these high temperatures through June, and yeah.

Krystal Vivian: I love it.

Shannon Allen: Yeah. I know you love summer. Me too.

Krystal Vivian: I am. I’m a summer girl.

Shannon Allen: Yeah.

Well, I’m excited today. I like it when we switch roles a little bit and I get to ask you questions. we’ve been working so hard on our AI, capabilities, right?

What we use… And it’s such a crazy… To say AI, because I brought it up with a client, just yesterday. I was in Fort Wayne, and I started to go into the AI conversation, and there’s so many different directions we can go. And, and I had to correct him. I said, “When I’m talking AI, I’m really talking about it as another form of search,” right?

Yeah. And then I kind of directed him back and said, “I’m not talking about you using AI to, you know, modernize your kitchen.” I’m talking about the person that goes to Google to do a search on remodeling their kitchen, and you get- Paid ads, you get organic search, but the first thing you get is something from AI-generated, right?

Krystal Vivian: Yes. Yeah, AI answer overview or you’re actually asking- Yes … for recommendations for what contractors should I look at for remodeling my kitchen? And you’re asking that in Claude or ChatGPT.

Shannon Allen: Yes. So, we’ve talked last fourth quarter we introduced our AI answer blogs to our clients

The best way I explain it when I’m talking to a client is think about your frequently asked questions, but now we’re making sure that content lives on your website so that you are part of that algorithm when you’re being searched, or if there’s somebody’s on their ChatGPT, you start to show up.

But it really seems like things have accelerated. I know it’s so much more of a common, conversation. Like, whenever we’re sitting out talking to our friends, it’s like, “Oh my gosh, you’re not using it?” Mm-hmm. So let’s bring it back to really the search part of it.

So what are you seeing that tells you that this isn’t just hype anymore, that this is actually changing how consumers find business? ‘Cause this is really changing our journey, right? The consumer journey.

Krystal Vivian: it absolutely is changing our journey. and you’re right that people are using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, all of these different tools more.

In fact, 37% of consumers are beginning their searches with an AI tool instead of going to Google, instead of going to DuckDuckGo or whatever search engine of choice that they have. They’re starting with Perplexity. They’re starting with ChatGPT. And the reason that they’re doing that is because one, when all of these tools first came out, they were trained on the internet up to a certain point, and they couldn’t search the web actively.

But then we’ve noticed within the last year that they all have the capabilities now to do a live search, and they can parse through a website, and they can search through Google, and they can do it for you. And they do it a lot faster, and they can find a lot more relevant information.

And what makes it really compelling to people, why consumers are choosing it, is because instead of getting a list of links, then you have to go through and decide which one of these is most relevant for you, it’s giving you the relevant information in a conversational format. So it’s like getting a recommendation from a friend, but it’s just an AI robot.

It’s just a chatbot, right? and so 37% of consumers are starting their search with AI tools, and AI tools are now handling 56% of search-related sessions. A third of the consumers are now more than half of the time going to ChatGPT to say, “Hey, I’m remodeling my kitchen. What are the latest trends in kitchen remodels?

How can I make my remodel- And, and I think that number’s

Shannon Allen: gone up. Like, wasn’t it, like, 25% back when we were doing another podcast last fall? I swear it was- It’s really jumped …

Krystal Vivian: it, it’s doubled.

Shannon Allen: Yeah.

Krystal Vivian: It has doubled since then, yeah. So, and look at, in February of this year, ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly active users.

That’s up from 400 million the year before. So they’re- That’s crazy. Yeah … more than double. Perplexity, which is one that I think some people forget about, but they have a lot of active users, in May of this year, so just last month, they had 780 million queries.

And Perplexity is mostly research based. Right. And it, it integrates ChatGPT, but if you’re doing deep research, Perplexity is the tool to use. That’s a 239% increase from August. So from August to May- It’s nearly tripled.

Shannon Allen: Well, I think what’s interesting to know, ChatGPT was, the first thing people talked about, right?

And, you know, we use Claude. Claude is becoming, more and more valuable. You know, they were the first to, go public, right? The IPO they’re going after now. Yeah, they

Krystal Vivian: filed their IPO Like, they beat ChatGPT, or OpenAI by

Shannon Allen: like two weeks. But even Perplexity, that surprised me ’cause that’s, you know…

You’re right, that’s very indicative on people understanding we’re starting to know which one to use when. So the- Yeah … consumers are becoming so much more educated, right?

Krystal Vivian: Yes, so much more educated, and Let’s be clear. You can use all of these tools for free.

Yes. And I think most consumers are. When I talk to my friends and my family, they’re all using it for free. I think my husband and I both are the only ones with paid, u- unless somebody’s using it for work. But nobody’s paying for it on their own, but they are using different tools for different things.

Shannon Allen: Right.

Krystal Vivian: and they’re using- It’s not

Shannon Allen: just a Google search anymore, right? Not just

Krystal Vivian: a Google search.

Shannon Allen: and that’s when I had to kind of explain it to the client, I first got him talking about how he uses it, and then I had to bring him back into his own consumer journey. So let’s think about the consumer journey, ’cause that’s, everything we do at FDS is at the center of that with digital, and that’s what I told this client.

Put yourself in that journey how you’re searching. Back in the day, we’d say you have to be found in a search, right? So you go to Google, you search for something, you read something, you do it, you leave. It was SEM, it was SEO. So let’s talk about how AI fits into that consumer journey. So is this an awareness thing?

Is this a research thing? How do you see how it fits into their marketing?

Krystal Vivian: It belongs squarely in the research stage. But there is an awareness element to it in the case that while you’re doing your research, you might not know of a specific brand, but that brand might be mentioned, right?

Yes. So that’s why at FDS with our clients, we talk about making sure that we’re at every part of the consumer journey because ChatGPT or Perplexity can pull something from your awareness stage marketing, but it’s when the consumer is in the research stage.

Shannon Allen: Yes.

Krystal Vivian: We’re noticing that that zero moment of truth, it’s happening inside ChatGPT or Perplexity and also Google.

It’s happening there, too. on Google, it’s really interesting because it’s now integrated with Gemini. And so they’re very much trying to stay hold of search and making sure that people are going there. and they have these AI summaries. when… an AI summary is present, which is in 78% of search queries now.

Users only click an organic result only 8% of the time, as opposed to 15% if there’s not an AI summary. So being recommended in that AI summary is really more valuable than ranking below it, and that’s where you talk about SEO versus that’s called AEO, answer engine optimization, is being found by Google’s AI so it’s, it’s happening in the research stage.

People are going to ChatGPT, they’re going to Google. And even on Google, they’re not just typing in keywords like they used to. They’re asking detailed questions.

Shannon Allen: Yeah.

Krystal Vivian: What restaurant near me is ADA accessible and is peanut free because I have an allergy? Yes. And then Google also is remembering that.

ChatGPT is remembering that. And so the next time you do a search for another restaurant, it knows what your specifications are of what you’re looking for, and it will recommend businesses that way.

Shannon Allen: Well, one thing we tell a client is, look, we sell SEO. I don’t care if my team ever sells a client SEO, because when they tell me they need SEO, I ask them to tell me, “Go deeper.”

Like, tell me why. Tell me more.

Krystal Vivian: Yeah.

Shannon Allen: Because the way that we’ve evolved, the way that AI is evolving, and how good we are at paid search, those two are much more effective for me than spending the amount of time to go up against the SEO rules. There’s- Google is gonna replace it at some point.

Krystal Vivian: It’s already game over for SEO. If you are building a brand-new website and you’re starting from scratch, then yes, you should consider some traditional SEO tactics, but you really should be optimizing for AEO-

and then GEO. And we’ll talk a little bit more about what AI actually needs. But specifically with the AI overviews, let’s talk about paid search, right? Because AEO, answer engine optimization, specifically with the AI overviews, works really well with the paid search. Paid SEM is still the fastest way to show up on Google.

we see it with our clients in the last year since chat search and Claude Search has really become a big thing. We have not noticed any negative impact with SEM for our clients across the board. I review every report before it goes out to our clients, and we are still getting incredible click-through rates- Yeah

incredible impressions, incredible results

Shannon Allen: It’s, it’s almost become more valuable than ever.

Krystal Vivian: Well, it is …

Shannon Allen: it couples so well together than SEO and SEM did, to be honest with you.

Krystal Vivian: Think about the actual types of keywords and key phrases that we are targeting search ads for as opposed to an organic search.

Shannon Allen: Yep.

Krystal Vivian: The disruption where search volume is down is in informational searches. It’s in very broad searches. But in the SEM keywords that we’re targeting, they’re very high intent transactional keywords. These are people who are close to that zero moment of truth, and that’s where our SEM budgets are focused, and so we’re still seeing results there.

Shannon Allen: Mm-hmm.

Krystal Vivian: statistically going even beyond what we’re seeing at FDS, in 2025, 65% of industries actually saw improved conversion rates from their paid ads because it’s more valuable than ever. And also, Google, that’s how they make money is through those paid ads, right?

So they’re never gonna get rid of that. They’re now putting SEM ads in AI overview results. In 25% of AI overviews, you’re gonna see an ad in there.

Shannon Allen: They make their money, the bulk- Yeah … of their money comes from SEM.

That’s never going to disappear, ever. They’re only gonna make it better, which is an advantage to the client. Yeah. I mean, that’s what business owners need to realize, that Google is doing it to make money, but they’re also doing it so that it’s part of this… It’s a more streamlined consumer journey to me when it’s part of the search solution.

Yeah. Right?

Krystal Vivian: 100%. And so if you have quality SEM ads and you make sure that you’re targeting the right keywords and the high intent and everything’s optimized, You’ve filtered out the negative keywords. You’re not buying your name or your competitors’ names, and then you have a really good AEO strategy for your business, if your brand is cited in an AI overview, your paid SEM click-through rate is 91% higher than if your brand is not cited in that AI overview.

So it’s kind of a double whammy. If you appear in the AI overview and then your SEM ad is right there right beneath it, You’re almost guaranteed to get the click.

Shannon Allen: let me give you an example of a stat that I used to train on,

When I would train SEO, I would explain in the training to our sales reps to talk to their clients that if you have good SEO, if an ad for SEO comes up, which is not really an ad, right? It’s the organic. Along with paid, it increases it by 15%.

Krystal Vivian: Yep.

Shannon Allen: Now, by the AI with the paid ad, it’s 91%. That in itself is reason for people to, if you’re spending a ton of money on SEO, to think of it a little differently.

Krystal Vivian: I, yeah, I would stop-

Shannon Allen: Yeah … Listen, that is why we… And that’s why I said we offer it, I don’t sell it. There has to be a very specific reason, a very specific business that does work for SEO and it is an organic conversation. But this 91%, I mean, that’s the headline right there to me.

Krystal Vivian: Yeah. It 100% is. So

Shannon Allen: when businesses are being found or not found, which is half the battle of what we talk to our clients about, right? just in a search, but really through AI now. So when you’re doing that search and you have no content on your website, you have nothing to…

you do not have any blogs, you don’t have any content that would bring you into an AI search. So what does AI actually need from a business to recommend it? Because I think that a lot of people just assume that if, oh, I have a website, it’s covered.

Krystal Vivian: Right, or I have social media,

Shannon Allen: it’s covered. Well, I tried to explain this to the client the other day because I said for SEO, their job is to crawl your website, so that’s why fresh content has always been so valuable.

It’s why we always have held blogs at a different level, but the way that the blog system works, a true blog is you need… You know, we used to say if content is king, then distribution is queen, Right. So the, the old traditional blog was what we had to really push and distribute because SEO is all about links.

Yeah. You got to link in, inbound links, and outbound links, right?

Krystal Vivian: Yep.

Shannon Allen: So now let’s take it back to AI and walk me through that you can’t just have good content on your website and have that AI’s gonna find you.

Krystal Vivian: No. You actually need three things. There’s three things that AI looks for, and this is pretty much true across the board, whether you’re using ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, you name it.

whatever new tool comes out, they’re all doing the same thing. So they’re looking for three signal types. One is structured data signals, one is reputation signals, and one is content signals. So let’s start with the structured data signals. What is that? That is your NAP.

That’s your name, address, phone number. That is the information that is accurate about your business. It should- Wherever it

Shannon Allen: is,

Krystal Vivian: right? Wherever it is. MapQuest, Yelp. Yes. It should be on your website. It needs to absolutely- Facebook, Google … be on your website.

Shannon Allen: Yeah. This is so old school.

NAP was something I trained years ago on the first thing you need to have on a website, right?

Krystal Vivian: Well, and that goes to show how back to basics this is- but also how many businesses struggle with this, because it’s not just looking at Google Business or just your website. It’s looking at MapQuest.

It’s looking at- ezlocal.com. It’s looking at these directories. It’s looking at Yelp. It’s looking at Facebook. It’s looking at these directories across the web that you might not even realize that your information is outdated on. If your business has moved at all in the last 10 years, your listing on yp.com, Yellow Pages, is probably inaccurate unless you’ve gone out there and specifically moved it.

Do you have reviews on these websites? Do you have, your attributes? Do you have photos? Is your information correct across those directories? If it is, then that is, that tells AI tools that you are a legitimate business. If it’s not correct, AI, We call it artificial intelligence, and it talks to us like a person, so we think that it thinks like a person.

It doesn’t. It’s looking for patterns. So if it can’t recognize a pattern across the web when it’s searching for your business, you’re not gonna show up. You’re not gonna be recommended. So the second thing is the reviews, and reviews are a really big thing. It’s kind of within that structured data, but I wanna call it out separately because This is how AI looks for pattern recognition from actual humans and human experiences.

So it wants to see that you’ve got reviews on Google. if the platform is relevant to you, Yelp, it wants to see that you have reviews on Yelp as well. and it cares about what is happening in that review, so what people are saying in the star rating, but it also cares about how many reviews you have and how frequently you’re getting reviews.

Yeah. So if you have a five-star rating but you only have five reviews on your business, that matters a lot less. You will be recommended less often by AI than- Wait, say

Shannon Allen: that, say that again for me. Say that one more

Krystal Vivian: if your business has a five-star rating on Google Business- Mm-hmm … but you only have five reviews, but your competitor has a 4.7 star rating, but they have 400 reviews- Yeah, that’s-

your competitor will be recommended over you. That’s…

Shannon Allen: Yeah.

Krystal Vivian: Because

Shannon Allen: I think that’s really important to know, because, the way that when we train on reputation in the past, it’s like explaining to people if somebody types in, you know, best pizza place near me, and you don’t have a minimum of four or better star, you’re not gonna show up.

But now it’s taking it a step further. even on Amazon, if we go in and looking for something and there’s three or four reviews, you’re like, “Okay, that’s their brother and their mother and their,” you know, like…

Krystal Vivian: Yeah. I won’t buy anything on Amazon that has less than 1,000 reviews.

Shannon Allen: Yeah. I agree.

Krystal Vivian: So think about that. That’s what people are looking for that as well, but AI is. Because again, they’re looking for that pattern recognition over time. Credibility, yeah. Any five people can have a great experience at your business, or it could be your spouse, your cousin, your uncle, your grandma, and your neighbor, right?

Shannon Allen: Well, if

Krystal Vivian: But if you have 400 people, and yes, we expect that there are a couple of people who are gonna have a bad time, because that’s just how it works, right? That’s, that’s, that’s Sally

Shannon Allen: that’s the troll behind that just wants to complain.

Krystal Vivian: Or somebody who did legitimately have a bad experience, but it’s just- Yeah

one experience, but it’s not what it’s-

Shannon Allen: One experience. And we weigh that, right?

Krystal Vivian: We weigh that. As does AI. They’re looking for that pattern recognition. So the reviews are really incredibly important. The third thing is the content signals, and this comes back to your website. So this is where our AI answer blogs come in.

you wanna have authoritative content on your website, formatted in question and answers that talks specifically about your real world experience, actual things that your business has done, that your employees have done, and isn’t just, “Well, this is what you should know about opening a 401K account” right?

It wants to go very deeper. It wants your expertise, your expert opinions from your team. This should be formatted, and you should have a general FAQ on your website, but AI optimized blogs should be written in a question and answer format that basically ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity can, when they get that question, your website is where they’re pulling that information from.

Shannon Allen: So it just needs to live on your website. The distribution, like I always say, you should distribute blogs at all times. And share them on your newsletter, do it in Facebook. But true blogging, the reason that blogging started to begin with was to distribute it out and have content moving around for the links.

Mm-hmm. Does AI answer blogs, does it just need to live on your website to be found?

Krystal Vivian: it does need to live on your website for AI to find it, and they are looking for links to reputable sources if you’re citing a statistic that needs to be sourced, right? They are looking for if your website is coming up from other people.

like for example, take a college. If you are ranked on US News Best Colleges in Indiana, then it does take that into account, right? it’s not to say that that’s the only thing that matters, but the blogs need to live on your website, and that makes a huge difference.

whether or not you distribute it out, that helps you with your branding and in reaching other consumers in other places like email and social media, then it does help the AI. So we don’t focus on the distribution aspect when we’re doing AI answer blogs with our clients. We’re focusing on the actual content, and is it accurate?

Is it specific? Are we showing off the expertise of our clients? because it matters, especially for local businesses. So if you think about local searches, including searches for businesses by category, service, or location, those are the among the fastest growing categories in AI overview appearances and in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

So having just the website alone is not enough. You need to have your listings accurate. You need to have reviews on Google, on Facebook, on Yelp if Yelp is related to you. Yelp is a tough one because Yelp you can’t solicit reviews. Google you can send an email out and say, “Hey, leave us a review on Google.”

You can do that on Facebook too, but Facebook doesn’t allow recommendations on mobile devices, which is insane to me. They took it away a couple of years ago. So you can see reviews and recommendations if you’re on facebook.com on a computer, but if you’re on your phone or on an app, you literally, it…

Shannon Allen: Like if you try to go to the URL you cannot see it. It’s very strange. I’ve taken it up with our business pro at Facebook, and he gets it, but he’s like, “I, I’m just the business pro. I can’t help you with that.” is there anything else about reviews that I’m missing?

Krystal Vivian: So AI platforms don’t just ask, “Is this business listed?” They ask, “What do people say about this business?” It wants to know the sentiment that generally people have. The other thing that you really wanna think about or that is really important is responding to reviews- Yes

positive and negative within 48 hours.

Shannon Allen: Yes.

Krystal Vivian: So think of it- It’s a

Shannon Allen: huge problem for people.

Krystal Vivian: It, it’s a huge problem for people. So think about this. If somebody is leaving you a review to tell you about their experience about your business, and then you aren’t responding to it, that tells AI that somebody is showing up and knocking on your front door and nobody’s home.

Shannon Allen: Right.

Krystal Vivian: So you wanna show that you’re home, that you are a responsive business owner, so you wanna respond within 48 hours to any review that you get, whether it’s positive or negative. And if it’s negative, you really wanna be th- thoughtful about how you respond. We’ve all seen the stories that go viral about the funny ways that a business responded to a negative review, and it was like, “You don’t even…

You were never even a customer here.” There’s things like that. be mindful of that. The biggest thing is to, you don’t wanna try to win the argument with that customer. You wanna make it right if you can make it right, but if it’s something where legitimately there’s nothing that you can do to, quote-unquote, “make it right,” maybe they’re just a troll, you wanna make sure that you’re responding in a way that is less about them and more about future customers and what AI is going to recommend and what AI is gonna see about your business.

Okay. So make sure that You wanna make sure that you’re soliciting reviews often, especially on Google. You wanna make sure that you’re responding to all of those reviews, and then, making sure that you’re consistently showing up.

Shannon Allen: So you’d really said, you know, in this question you said there’s really two main signals, and you talked about the structured data, which includes, you know, the NAP, name, address, phone number. Be accurate wherever you’re found. You talked about the reviews, how valuable they are, and I think you made some really good points that it can’t just be, you know, four people telling you you’re good.

You need… there’s a lot more involved in this, so that’s really thinking through how you’re asking for those. But let’s talk about the second part of the signal, which is the content piece, right? So you’ve been leading our AI Answer blog work, from the beginning. You and I had this discussion last fall.

It’s crazy how when we talk to our clients about it, it is a no-brainer, right? Mm-hmm. They are, “I’m in. Sign me up.” I know you’re passionate about this. What people don’t always know about you is that You’re a journalist, right? You’re a writer at heart. Not everybody in this day and age that says they write or blog, they’re not writers.

You’re a true journalist, right?

Krystal Vivian: Yeah.

Shannon Allen: So as you put all these pieces together, I know that that little geeky side of you that you love is figuring these backends out. So how does content factor into whether AI recommends a business, whether that’s on your phone or in Gemini?

Krystal Vivian: So it really is about making sure that you’re having the right information formatted in a way that AI can read it.

And I’ll try not to… There is a lot of geekiness to this because it’s– part of it is about having the right content written in a way, a question and answer, right? So you have the question as your subheading, and then you answer it right away very directly without very much fluff. You have named expert quotes, so that’s where we’re quoting somebody who actually works for your business, whether that’s you as the business owner or it’s somebody on your team.

and then source statistics, and these can be statistics that you have from your own business, but it could be statistics from elsewhere. so that’s the main format that we want. but then there’s metadata and other things that go into it. Our subheadings need to be in H2 and H3 tags, depending on what the hierarchy is.

We wanna format it in the same way the AI platforms are pulling and summarizing the information. So they’re not writing for a reader. They’re not writing this giant, long, fluffy, beautiful piece. They’re directly answering the question that you have, searching for it. You wanna make sure that it’s formatted in a way that they’re gonna pull it.

think about writing for a citation. It’s very direct, but it also needs to be very thorough. So our AI answer blogs, the headline is a question, and then most subheadings are a question, and there’s probably eight to 10 questions within that blog that we’re answering- all centered around that one topic.

it’s really cool with the AI answer blogs and with the way that you’re formatting content for AI search because it used to be with traditional SEO, it would take six to 12 months to start showing up. AI citation improvements, you can typically see those within 30 to 45 days of you starting to publish this type of content.

it’s really effective. Actually, around 80% of URLs that are cited by ChatGPT and Claude and Perplexity, they’re not ranking in Google’s top 100 results for the same question. So it is not the same as traditional SEO. it is true AEO and GEO. GEO is the generative engine optimization.

That’s where you’re optimizing it for Claude, for ChatGPT, for Perplexity. and we’re doing both. We make sure that our AI answer blogs are optimized for Google’s AI overviews and ChatGPT and Claude and Perplexity. And the last thing that I wanna always point out, which I really love, you’re gonna get less traffic from an AI recommending your business than you used to get from a traditional SEO.

But visitors referred by AI platforms convert at 4.4 times the standard of, for, at

Visitors referred by an AI platform like ChatGPT or Perplexity, they’re converting at a 4.4 times the rate of your standard organic visitors. So

Shannon Allen: we’ve talked about- and that makes sense I mean, I get that ’cause SEO is much more clinical.

Krystal Vivian: It’s

Shannon Allen: much

Krystal Vivian: more clinical Right?

Shannon Allen: It’s, it’s harder, it was harder for Google to be, have the credibility in SEO of giving exactly, ’cause they were so dependent on what was living…

It was crawling the website and only pulling things, where with AI, AI is using its own brain to answer the question so that the credibility is there, right?

Krystal Vivian: The credibility is there. Well, and think about, again, the user experience of a search engine versus an AI tool. On a search engine, you’re given a bunch of links, and you’re hoping to find the information that you want.

And you’re probably gonna go through three or four organic links before you find the information that you wanna get to, and then you choose the business that you’re gonna work with, right? But when you’re working with an AI tool, you’re gonna be talking with that AI tool and asking questions and narrowing it down, and then you’re gonna go to that business’s page.

So by the time that you get there to the business’s page from an AI tool versus an organic tool, you’re already primed and ready to buy. Yeah. You’re at that conversion stage. So-

Shannon Allen: Yep … it is just a lot more

Krystal Vivian: quality over

Shannon Allen: quantity, right?

Krystal Vivian: a lot more quality, yes.

Shannon Allen: So we’re kinda coming to the end here, so I’m gonna package this last question together.

You came to me and said, I’ve got something really cool.” We have AI answer blogs. We have what we call our local, concierge, which is we can take care of your directory listings. We can do concierge plus, which layers in the reputation and the reviews. We sell that individually.

It’s based on per location, right?

Krystal Vivian: Mm-hmm.

Shannon Allen: So those two combined, you really came to me and you said, I think because of these two main components that you talked about, the what needs to fire, you’re like, “I’ve got the perfect solution to package this together.” So tell our listeners what that is, and then tie that to the end of how is that a return on investment for the client?

Krystal Vivian: Okay. So-

Shannon Allen: Kinda give a brief of what it is, and then the ROI.

Krystal Vivian: Yep. I’m calling it the AI recommended suite, and it- pairs our location concierge plus, which is the, the business listings and the review generation. All we ask our clients to do, and we send them an email every single month, is send us a list of everybody who has done business with you in the last 30 to 60 days, and then we will send out an email to them to generate a review on Google for you.

Shannon Allen: Half the time that’s the missing piece, that clients don’t know how to even start with asking for reviews.

Krystal Vivian: Correct, and they don’t know how to word it, And it’s different for every business, right? So we take that over for you entirely. We just need the first name and the email address.

We don’t need to know anything more than that. and then It combines it with our AI answer blogs, so it’s a single coordinated strategy that works across all of those three signals, the structured data, the reputation, and the content signals, to let AI tools know this is business is real, and this business is trustworthy.

I think in 2026, we keep hoping as business owners that AI is gonna find our business and tell people about it. This is our way of saying, “You can actually make sure that AI is-” That they find you … “recommending your business.” Not just finding it. It’s not just about AI discoverability. It’s about being recommended

Shannon Allen: and that’s, that’s a good point. We’ve sold for years the directory listing because we wanna make sure you’re found and it’s accurate. Yes. But the missing piece is the layer of making sure reviews are good.

The final missing piece is this AI answer blogs. Yeah. Because I think there’s a lot of companies out there we come up against, I mean, we use Yext, we’re powered by Yext for our directories. Everybody sells the same thing if they’re selling directory listing updates. Mm-hmm. That’s who we prefer to use.

But what’s missing is, and there’s a lot of clients that like somebody else to do it for them, which is why we do the concierge service, which means you can do it yourself, but you won’t. You’ll forget about it. To me, if you’re using somebody else to do your directories, but you’re missing this piece, just let us do it all for you.

Krystal Vivian: Yeah. We’ll take care of it all for you. It’s completely off your hands. And not completely off your hands, because we do need, especially for the AI overview or AI answer blogs, we do need specific information from your business. But we’ll ask you exactly what it is that we need, right?

Shannon Allen: Right.

If you did it- You don’t have to go figure out what that is. We’re gonna do the interview with you.

Krystal Vivian: Correct. And you also don’t have to reply to your reviews. We’ll reply to every single review for you. And if you get a negative review, we’ll flag it to you first and make sure that we have an appropriate response that fits your brand and fits best practices so that you don’t even have to think about that.

So it’s all handled for you. It’s a true concierge service. And when you tie those together, if you are a business, and especially right now as we are still in the very beginning of AI discoverability and local businesses being found by AI, businesses that get started now, they’re already seeing the impacts on their business.

They’re already seeing the impacts on their search. and you asked about ROI. The return on investment really comes from being recommended by AI. We already talked about AI search converts visitors at a 4.4 times the rate as traditional organic search visitors. Brands that are cited inside AI overviews earn 120% more organic clicks per impression than brands that are not mentioned at all.

AI referral traffic is converting at an average of 5.8% across all industries, which is very comparable to SEM for most industries. That’s incredible.

You never saw that with SEO. No,

Shannon Allen: And, I mean, that’s why we push anybody that wants SEO, we make them do SEM, and that’s still…

these still all work together. It’s part of the consumer journey. But- you truly should do both … I mean, those are great ROI numbers.

Krystal Vivian: Oh, 100%. So, and we’re really… think about what I said earlier about how much volume of search traffic has really increased in the last

12 months on AI. We’re just at the beginning. Right. It’s already growing. But the quality of the output is already exceptional, and the businesses that are making sure that they’re recommended by AI now are going to be leading the pack among their competitors for months and years to come because they have all of that information all on their website.

And when AI recommends your business, it’s not just a click. it’s not just sending somebody there. It’s an endorsement to somebody who is primed. They have an answer. You’re the answer. They trust it already because ChatGPT- told them that you’re trustworthy.

Shannon Allen: Right.

Krystal Vivian: That’s an endorsement.

That’s an endorsement … right there.

Shannon Allen: We’re selling our version of this together, for 850 a month for one location because I wanna point out to everybody, when it comes to directory listings and for reviews, Google made that rule, not us.

It’s based on per location because it’s name, address, and phone number. And it’s based on the review of that location, so whatever business you’re in. But for 850 a month you get six AI answer blogs for the year, you get the interview, you get us doing all your directory listings, like why wouldn’t you do this?

Krystal Vivian: Mm-hmm. Why

Shannon Allen: wouldn’t you?

Krystal Vivian: it’s a very straightforward investment, and even if you have multiple locations,

Shannon Allen: you need- Yeah,

Krystal Vivian: we work with you

Shannon Allen: on it.

Krystal Vivian: Yeah … we work with you on that, and you need reviews generated for every single one of those locations. Because if I live in Elkhart, and if you have a location in Elkhart and in South Bend, I might go to the South Bend location because the office is closer to it, or maybe I work closer to South Bend, and that location has better reviews.

That’s true. So, but if you wanna capture me in Elkhart, then the Elkhart location needs to have great reviews too.

Shannon Allen: So I’m gonna wrap it with remember it’s the three things you need is you need accurate directory listings, you need great reviews, so your reputation has to be there and there has to be…

It can’t just be Mom and Dad reviewing you. And last but not least, the AI answer blogs. So I, this is a no-brainer.

Great job. I love it. we are gonna be talking about some political information in our next podcast, but this is a great one to end the month of June, right? So-

Krystal Vivian: Absolutely …

Shannon Allen: thank you for taking the time today. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in to Digital Marketing ROI.

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