The Truth about SEO/AEO/GEO/AIO and More

Priscilla McKinney: You know, I like boomerangs because when something's real good, you bring them back. And that's the case today with Andy Crestodina. If you know me, you know Andy Crestodina because I talk about him all the time. And so it is absolutely my pleasure to have Andy back on the show. Welcome, Andy.

Andy Crestodina: Glad to be back, Priscilla. It's been a long time. We did this years ago, I think. Yeah, a while ago.

Priscilla McKinney: This is my my goodness. But but we've talked a lot since then. You're my favorite person to shoot the shit with about everything web, everything content. And I'm just gonna tell you right now, I know you do your big annual content survey and I filled it out yesterday on my couch before I even left for work.

Andy Crestodina: Mm-hmm. Thank you. That is such a giant project getting all those responses.

But I'm glad to be back here at the perch with you. Never miss a chance to hang out with you, Priscilla. So I've been looking forward to this.

Priscilla McKinney: Awesome. Well, the other thing we'll say is that I have you coming to Insights Marketing Day once again. You are my most in-demand speaker at my event. And the the usually goes something like this, my gosh, that guy blew my mind.

Andy Crestodina: Mm-hmm. Wow, nice to hear. No, I would never miss that event. That's i everyone loves that event. Insights Marketing Day is very special.

Priscilla McKinney: Well, it is special and it's like it's the way that people interact with each other. It's the approachability. Of course we have great speakers. You're gonna be presenting, but I think you and I both know that you and I come for the gelato cart.

Andy Crestodina: The little touches make a difference and you're so good at that.

Priscilla McKinney: It does. It really does. But today I'm going to do a huge favor for my audience. And I am going to talk to the expert about what is going on with every acronym in SEO, AEO, GEO.

I don't know what else are we calling it today. And we're going to talk about really the land that is shifting underneath our feet right now. But just to give it some context, I'm going to talk just the first question I want to ask you a little bit about.

Andy Crestodina: Mm-hmm.

Priscilla McKinney: Content and what you know about having tracked content for decades really. So let's talk a little bit about your specialty niche in tracking B2B content performance over many decades. That's what you've been doing through Orbit Media Studios annual research. And as I said, I took I I I sent in my answers and it's just like it's this amazing thing to be able to say, okay, I'm going to just be completely honest. This is really what it takes me to do content.

So that I can get an amazing, you know, deck back from you. So I really understand what my counterparts are doing in this industry. But I want to know when you're looking at that and you've seen this over so long, what was the first indication to you that the old SEO playbook was breaking?

Andy Crestodina: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, it's been breaking for a long time. And there is I I think of it this way. A content marketer lives in tension with Google because content marketers complain about zero click searches.

They didn't click on my you know, there's n there's no traffic, because Google has done a great, great job of over many years of keeping people on their properties. But to the but if you're Google, a click on an organic search listing is zero click for you. Because that person just left your your your ecosystem. So all content marketers have forever lived in tension with Google.

I saw this coming years and years ago when Google added the people also ask box and Google added the featured snippet, and Google like all suddenly all the videos are all YouTube videos, no other platforms show up in you in in in video carousels. So it was obvious to me, and so I said, well, I need a different steady, reliable way to build a brand.

So I move to a LinkedIn newsletter and my content has been triple the visibility there because the content marketer lives in harmony with social media, because social media to them, you're a creator and you're bringing people to the platform and you're keeping keeping people on their site.

So b so for the in and and we're just talking about content marketing here, which to be clear is the information intent visitor who has a question, wants an answer, needs some advice, looking for best practices.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm mm.

Andy Crestodina: Very, very different from the commercial intent visitor who needs what LittleBird does, who needs what Orbit Media does. Most people have commercial intent. There's the click-through rates from there are still quite high. There's still lots of traffic, billions in demand are flowing through Google.

But yeah, it's as a content marketer, it it's a it's a strange time because you know we were all used to for so long just targeting a keyword and how to do this and how to do that. And we had lots of traffic from that. Millions. I had millions of visitors a year from that.

And as I watched that decline, it didn't freak me out because I'd already kind of adapted my strategy. I think it's a moment when we all need to reconsider and adapt our our strategies for building brands.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm-hmm. I think one of the things I start with when I talk about this whole scenario is to remind people that Google doesn't care about you and that Google it Google is a for profit advertising media company. So it's an ad company. Yeah.

Andy Crestodina: No. It's that's the proper exactly. It's an ad company. Like what do you expect? You want free value from an ad company? That's not reliable. Mm mm.

Priscilla McKinney: Not gonna happen. Not gonna happen. Okay, we're gonna get kind of pinpointed now. And I have to say, I'm gonna put a link to your newsletter, your LinkedIn newsletter.

I think it is the most valuable property in marketing and content marketing and web. I mean, you break things down and really show your homework. This is what I did. This is what happened when I did this. Here, click here, click here.

I mean, it it you do so much work, and I just I so appreciate it. I shout it out. I kid you not, if you're listening to this podcast, this is not another LinkedIn newsletter, you want to subscribe to this. So I'll put the link in the show notes.

But let's kind of push beyond there. So I joke around about all the acronyms, you know, AEO, GEO, SEO, all these kinds of things. And in general, this is my perspective, and sh feel free to knock it down.

But AEO wants you to structure for extraction. Like, what can I get out of this website? GEO wants, you know, to get cited inside of someone else's answer, right? And then that traditional SEO is still looking for that click for that traffic. And these are now three different directions we're being pulled into. And I guess, can you just discuss a little bit the real trade-off and and and the growing tension in between all of those things?

Andy Crestodina: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. It's wild. It's r and it's and I think it it's it's fascinating and it's fun. And I think that we should see as that a as an opportunity.

I think disruption and opportunity are really the same thing. It just depends on your frame on your on your kind of your your mindset. So SEOs and AI search optimizers understand very well that systems have to be able to to read pages, to extract meaning, to understand, you know, to be able to crawl things and know what the page is about.

That is common and will always be important. I don't think that ever disappears. But what the SEO has focused on that makes them a little bit off balance here in this era is that the idea of like keywords and just the the structure of content not really sufficient anymore because artificial intelligence is very intelligent. It knows more, it's not just looking for keywords.

The SEO's goal of citations, I think, is insufficient. You want to be cited? Is that it? Because maybe someone will click. I can't study this properly because there's no data for it really that we have access to, but the click through rates on those little citations and AI responses must be vanishingly small.

Like there's no people really aren't going to AI to find places to click. Not not mostly. But when someone has in a commercial intent, you know, who's the best agency to help me with optimization that also supports websites, or maybe you can move my site from this platform to that platform. These people are writing very long prompts. The average prompt is like eight times longer than the average query.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm.

Andy Crestodina: Then really we have to start with empathy and know what this person is likely to be prompting about. You have to go back to the foundations that Priscilla, I know you you understand and care about and love. The audience. What is this person's real problem you're trying to solve?

Because if you don't do that, you can't predict their prompts, you can't answer the right questions, you can't get shortlisted. That's my new goal. Not to get an AI, not to be visible in AI, but to get recommended by AI, which is wildly different.

If you're trying to get AI to recommend you, you you write stuff that has nothing to do with keywords at all. You write stuff that's like buyer questions, real buyer questions.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Andy Crestodina: You have to answer questions of that that go far beyond the keyword and go far beyond these crappy little FAQ sections people are paper clipping to the bottom of their pages.

Priscilla McKinney: Right, right. My gosh. Okay. So the first thing that people are doing, and it is foundational, is they are changing the schema of their websites and they are adding FAQ sections. And that alone is not going to solve this very complicated problem.

Of course, you know, it's a beginning. And I do like the fact that if you have to write a FAQ, it does move you towards empathy because you're thinking, gosh, what would they be asking? You know?

And so that I think informs you, okay, well then what kind of content should I be writing? If these are the FAQs, then you know where how can I go deeper with this? How can I solve this in a more more profound way for a client? So I love what you're saying. Yes.

Andy Crestodina: Mm-hmm.

Priscilla McKinney: That's kind of the easy answer. People change the schema, you know, add the FAQ. But if you don't have good content on your website, it's not going to help you. Right?

So that's kind of, you know, again, as you and I for decades and decades, you know, there's no quick fix. Quit asking us for a silver bullet. You know, if you even take you know, three minutes to read through one of Andy's newsletters, then you'll see.

Andy Crestodina: Mm-hmm.

Priscilla McKinney: It's more complicated than that. And for every client, it's going to be different. So there's no substitute for you getting into the back end of your own website and understanding what is really happening for you. And that in reference to who your real ideal client is, how they might move move through that journey.

So I just absolutely underscore that with you. But there are some things that people can do that are a a little bit easy. Like how would someone get started looking at their website properly?

Andy Crestodina: Mm-hmm. Well, first of all, I think and I I I cringe a little bit earn even hearing myself say it because I'm a I love writing copy and I love the beauty of words and storytelling. But you have to remember this. Taglines don't train the AI to recommend you.

Taglines don't train AI. Overly branded, overly clever copy is unhelpful. That was always true even the in the I mean, that's always been true, because we are partly talking to systems. We want the system to understand us.

So there's a time and a place for the beautiful, beautifully constructed, you know, eight-word challenger statement. But it has to be specific enough for both these bots to know what it what we're all about here and answer, and you said it perfectly. What are the frequently asked questions?

That is it's in a h in the context of a hyper personalized platform, AI, best practices are insufficient. You can check every best practices box and still lose. You know, I I did this, I did this, I did this, I did this, my my but it's really if we don't know what the actual decision criteria are for a prospect, what hope do you have?

The AI saying, like, yep, that's it. You know, this these these are the three companies you should definitely talk to. Because that person is really having a whole conversation. Think of it as word of mouth marketing.

But word of an artificial mouth. You want this this bot this this this LLM to be your friend and to recommend you when it's when people ask that one weird specific thing. If you miss that, it's gonna recommend someone else.

So there is a simple thing. This is weirdly straightforward, but almost no one's done it in my experience. Have a lawn pour yourself a glass of wine. Sit back on a comfortable chair.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm.

Andy Crestodina: And have a 20 or 30 minute conversation with the AI about who it recommends in your vertical, why it would recommend them, why wouldn't it recommend you? And you may find huge gaps, unlike traditional SEO. You can see into the model, you can ask it, you can find out what's in its training data and why it wouldn't recommend you for that ICP.

It's actually quite transparent. Like it you you can and yeah, we've shared for the prompts and the methods and you know, some of them are kind of fancy, some of them are very straightforward.

But even without fancy prompts, just have a long conversation with the AI. Who do you recommend when someone needs this, this, this, and this? Why do you recommend them? Why didn't you recommend us?

I didn't answer that key question. So yeah, it is empathy, it's understanding the the FAQs. There's kind of a hack for this. It's creepy? Priscilla, you tell me.

Priscilla McKinney: Hm.

Andy Crestodina: If you this is valuable and I I don't hesitate to teach it, but it's it's it it's a strange it I think this is a big unlock. Grab the transcripts of your last twenty sales calls, put them all in a big doc, export it as a markdown file, which is the lightweight file that AI likes.

It's like few tokens, good carbon efficiency, you know, pick your reason. And then talk to it about what people truly ask you, what they're really hoping for. What are the deeper reasons?

What sent them on this? What's the story in their life that sent them on a journey to try to find your brand? What did they know about you that they had to ask because you didn't answer it on your pages?

Like you could empathy is easy in the post-COVID era because so many of our calls are just recorded. I mean, it's not weird. Yeah. So it's very, very few marketers have done analysis on their sales called transcripts, but that is where you'll find what the truly frequently asked questions are.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm-hmm. Okay, well, you had me pour yourself a large glass of wine, so I'll do this. But I think that comes back to research and it instead of us going with our gut and saying, well, you know, this is why people, you know, look for us.

This is what motivates my buyer. You don't know. Just stop for a minute. And even when you ask one of your buyers, you're gonna get a different question because I'm a cultural anthropologist and I know I just inserted myself into that.

And so Andy is going to say something different because he's now trying to please me and he's trying to like mirror back to me what he thinks I want to know. And this is why I serve the market research industry. Cause I think you really do need third-party research.

But I love what you're saying here is that this is a little bit of a hack to third-party research because you are taking a recording of something when someone is not in the moment trying to please you. They're actually doing the opposite. You know, in a sales call or a pitch, they may be, you know, trying to move away from you.

But inevitably those truths will come out. Why did they come? What are they really looking for? How are they trying to guide you? And my God, are you on a phone call anymore that's not recorded? Like my whole life is recorded at this point. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Crestodina: It's out there. I know. You're sitting on it. You're sitting right on top of all that data, that first party data. VOC, voice of customer, the gold standard in research, in a perfectly natural setting.

And if it's creepy, it's like, you know, I think that that sales team squirm when you say I'm downloading all the transcripts, just tell AI to ignore what the rep said. You really only or or strip out anything but the key questions that clients ask.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm. Yes.

Andy Crestodina: You know, it's it's really you're not you don't have to watch all the calls. You're just using it as a as a quick way to find what questions people ask and then go answer those in your pages.

And also I don't think you need to use an FAQ section necessarily. I don't love the idea of FAQ in a box at the bottom. If that is the frequently asked question, if it's real this SEOs don't know what the F stands for, it means frequently. If that is the frequently asked question.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm.

Andy Crestodina: It should be higher up on the page. It should be answered in the flow. It should be part of the user experience.

Priscilla McKinney: It should be the title of the blog. You've been asking this. Here's our answer. So, you know. Right, right.

Andy Crestodina: Yeah. And not and not just the blog, the service pages, right? The the sales pages, the money pages, the commercial intent keyword targeted money page. Yeah.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. I love that. I think that's so great. Let's say they do finally do this. What is simple but not easy, right?

So it's simple to get that. And even you think about how many people have gone, you know, instituted. I mean, this it's information is sitting there right there for you. But let's say they do that and they start getting a little bit of traction.

They start getting maybe some citations, maybe they start coming up. What, you know, let's talk a little bit about the other problem, which is now that means that people are living over on AI and getting their questions answered without ever visiting your website.

So you know, here we we used to live in a world where you and I were always trying to get people to someone's website. And now that's not necessarily what we're trying to do. We're trying to get them to that decision.

And so help me understand how you would recommend a CMO or a marketing manager think about this dichotomy of I've got to look on my back end to see how often we're being cited, how often we're showing up and being recommended, and the fact that people aren't coming to our website anymore. Help us with that.

Andy Crestodina: You it's you you really can't overstate the change to the internet that this has made. It is you need to look differently at what success means to your brand. It it feels like going back to the pre-internet era when we are all just focused on bottom line metrics.

We need to focus on leads, not traffic. We need to because AI is a layer on top of the web and our websites become important not just as user experiences, but as a way to train these AIs to to to shortlist us.

It's it we've seen this. You and I, anyone Gen X, all of us who've been around a little while have seen this over and over. First you had the internet, that's like era one, browsers, email, you know, and then you had, you know, search becomes the main way to use the internet.

That was a little bit later, you know, early 2000s, it becomes the dominant thing. There's a massive search tool in every category. Like this, like search became critically important. And then you had mobile and social at the same time.

This is a major revolution in how people use the web. No. And now you have AI. These are the eras that we have lived through. And in this era, you have to you have to step back from your assumptions about what success looks like.

Priscilla, this is a weird statement. I've never really said this before, but it's a thought I've I've had recently. Really, what we're coming out of is an era when traffic was artificially high due to weird untargeted like unqualified visitors.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm.

Andy Crestodina: This makes the web more efficient. It makes the visitors more qualified. It it so if you look at traffic, we're sad. But if you look at the opportunity to kind of people who you can really help through this new layer of conversation, I think it it still is an opportunity.

But yeah, our traffic was ridiculous before this time. I had just huge amounts of visitors to these really weird blogs and they sh and it all showed up in my top line traffic levels.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm-hmm.

Andy Crestodina: Organic traffic is up. Traffic in the previous era that we're moving out of now was artificially inflated by piles of visitors who had pure information needs. They don't never gonna hire us. Or unqualified visitors.

Then they landed in my pipeline, but I we can't really help them. You know, this should make the web better.

Priscilla McKinney: Hm, right. Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Crestodina: I hope, and and make each visitor more qualified because they did their consideration stage thinking inside the model.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay. I love it. And I'm just telling you, it actually came out of my mouth sitting on the couch last night. I was planning a trip to Spain. And at one point I just looked at my husband and I said, I hate Google. It's worthless.

And yes, did I end up going to websites? Sure, because AI cited them for me and I moved right on. But it was about the intent. And almost every single one that I moved to from that from that conversation, I bought something from and actually spent an awful lot of money because I really was on my own journey and I wasn't being served something that was so artificial.

Andy Crestodina: Mm-hmm.

Priscilla McKinney: And as you know, you know, I've been on, you know, you know, all of us it was like the longer you spend on a particular model. It said, well, considering and then it referenced a conversation I had about, you know, some, you know, a past trip that we had in Athens.

Andy Crestodina: Mm-hmm.

Priscilla McKinney: And it's like, well, based on this that you really like, we would recommend that, you know. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, I hadn't even thought about that. And it it really understood me to your point of empathy.

And so why on earth would I ever go to Google? That is inflating, clicking here, clicking here, but that's not really what I want. And that's I'm it's not putting me in a position and in the mind state to actually buy from this company. Right.

Andy Crestodina: Yeah. So five years ago, search, scan, click, land, back button, click, land, back button. And you were set you were adding traffic to all those websites, but you were discounting them, right?

That like that that's not a way, you know, and you've got to keep six things in your mind at once. Now you can put in these like very and people every day, people right now, thousands, millions of people right now, as we speak, are putting in these very long what Google would call multi parameter searches.

I'm looking for a trip that has walking distance from the gothic quarter of the town and has a rooftop with a pool and I I'm gluten free and like all whatever weird, you know, that is how people it's a better way to use the web.

And it's still a way of marketer we we can all win now. We can still win. If the pay if your content and it's training, it's Google's AI is visiting your website right now. Is it learning all the things that it needs to know to correctly route the people that are truly qualified?

If yes, you're going to get very high conversion traffic. A smaller number of much more qualified visitors. I think that's a good thing. It's wild just how useful it is at narrowing options and giving you and then it's it's strange, right?

Priscilla McKinney: Mm, mm-hmm.

Andy Crestodina: The the website becomes the mechanism for conversion. When the person lands, their feet are sort of dangling out of the bottom of the funnel. They're like ready to go.

A visitor from AI, one page contact, thank you. That's it. Like they don't really they're they're they're not there to read everything. They're there just to confirm that you're legit, you're still in business, you you are who you said you are.

Priscilla McKinney: Right.

Andy Crestodina: So yeah, it's we should embrace this. We should be happy. We should is we should see it as an opportunity.

Priscilla McKinney: Right. Right. Yeah, yeah, I know how much you and I would just be, you know, in you know, in love with the data when it would tell us how we're extending the time on page, you know, for visitors.

And, you know, it's hard to it's hard to walk away from that world. And you're right, to have these, you know, beautiful blogs that you've spent all this time on. But listen, I I always tell clients, you know, the KPI that really matters is this. Do you feel like you're printing money in the back room? You know.

Andy Crestodina: Yeah. Yep. Yep. My my buddy Matt Hines says the best marketing metrics are in your CRM.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm, there you go. Yeah, I love it. Closing deals.

Andy Crestodina: Are you closing deals? Like are these i is is the is the sales closing rate from these leads? That's not even in analytics, but it's data. And and a lot of marketers don't even don't spend much time in those CRM data.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm-hmm. Right. Right. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I love what we're saying, and but obviously the work is super important of then what am I going to do now to my website?

I really do need to make a shift. A website that worked two years ago is not one that works today. If they're coming and the intent has been done, we need to make sure that there's no friction when they arrive and that they can move into that action very quickly.

I like I had already considered all my considerations. I came to the site, I was ready to go. And then I found out they were sold out. Okay, off. And I go back. That's the only reason someone should be, you know, really leaving a site if they came with that intention of buying.

And so then I had to go, you know, find another option. But you do need to look at your website and consider if someone were coming with this purpose, have I removed friction where they can get the demo, book the meeting?

Andy Crestodina: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Priscilla McKinney: You know, book an appointment if it's a clinic. You know, you're just like, what is your thing? What is the thing that you need them to do? And are you adding friction to it or are you making it like, thank you, that's so nice to the person sitting on their couch with the glass of wine trying to get it done.

Andy Crestodina: It's it's so important. So it and it's and it's and it even goes and and there's other things as well. We have to remove friction, we have to align with the visitor psychology, we have to trigger cognitive biases, we need to fill these pages with evidence and proof.

Because once you do have a visitor, you st all the normal psychological experiences that happen there, you know, urgency. Book now before we you know, there's you know that some there's limited space. Did you remember to say that? Still have a question? Talk to Priscilla.

Like the the human side of it. Like, you know, that's often missed. There's still a hundred little conversion optimization methods that are still in play, because after all, there's direct traffic, there's other sources of traffic. There's more to life than AI and Google.

But also I think that it's worth saying, we haven't said it yet, it's that AI searches. There's SEO is still a thing. AI for many of those multi parameter, super long forty word prompts, like I'm looking for a place in Spain that has like it doesn't have enough in its training data to answer that question by itself. It searches.

And when AI searches, it still matters to have a site that has pages per topic, a page per industry, a page per service, a page for geography, a page per team member. And some of those, it's in combination.

This service in this geography, like what's the matrix? Like you still have to kind of have so sites sometimes, they're just still too small. Sites a site that's not optimized for search. Google and ChatGPT and Perplexity will never even find it.

Priscilla McKinney: Right.

Andy Crestodina: You know, there's there are the search didn't die. AI searches. And you know, AI isn't the only thing, even though Google summarizes, they're all hybrid models. Google summarizes, ChatGPT searches.

So that's not like they're separate things. But no, I I love your point about reducing friction. In the end, there's a human. That's our job. It's a human. We're trying to connect with the person in the moment.

Priscilla McKinney: Right. Right. So that brings us back to one other acronym that has always been true. And that is the EAT, the experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and the trustworthiness of who you are.

And so it does come back to this. This is why we say content does matter. This is being searched. And if you don't create it and you don't differentiate yourself, and if you don't answer all the questions, and if you don't do it on the regular, to where AI feels like it can trust you and it wants to win by recommending you, then none of this matters.

But I'm gonna throw you a big question here to end with. And actually, I had asked my whole team, Andy's coming on, what do you want to ask? And this was the funny one that came from your friend and mine, Leighton. He said, how many acronyms does it take to change the light bulb of online research? And I know what he's trying to ask, so I'm gonna paraphrase his question a little bit differently.

Andy Crestodina: Yeah.

Priscilla McKinney: And I I, you know, I think we need to talk about the continuum that these disciplines are. But I guess my my last question there, and you can wax a little bit, you know, maybe Nostradamus if you want, but you know, five years from now, or frankly, five months from now, do you think we will still be saying SEO, AEO, GEO separately? Or will this whole naming exercise really collapse into one big term? And you know, what could that be or what what do you think of that whole world and how this continuum is going to be understood?

Andy Crestodina: Yeah. Well if if I could give it latent one acronym, I'd say you can answer it all with one. It's IMD, Insights Marketing Day. Just come to Insights Marketing Day. It's all it will all be clear.

But but your your deeper question is pretty real because and here's my prediction. This era benefits the most the full funnel marketer.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm.

Andy Crestodina: So a lot of the acronyms are specific to a channel or a buying stage, buying journey stage. You know, SEO is at the top and AEO and conversion optimization is at the bottom. You know, an EEAT is one part of SEO, and like there's just so many letters and it's it's exhausting.

But who wins? It's the marketer that has the full perspective. You know, they're the sales connected, revenue focused marketer. That is so I mean I I just think of myself and hope and aspire to always be a better B2B lead gen marketer.

That frees me from bias toward channels that separates, you know, I don't worry about acronyms or, you know, is this am I am I this or am I that? And AI in a as a skills amplifier, as a as a tool for all of us getting better at our jobs, which is the other half of AI. Right?

Everyone's using it for everything in their jobs. AI doesn't know silos. AI doesn't care about silos. AI doesn't stop at SEO. It if it when it knows what you're trying to do and and you prompt it well and give it goals, it goes it blasts right through the silos.

It'll start talking about sales. It'll start talking about conversion. Ask it about search, it'll talk about conversion. Talk about conversion, it'll talk about sales. So really I think that we need to expand our skill sets.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm.

Andy Crestodina: And whatever you were doing last year and two years ago, start to learn the adjacent skills that make you a more complete, comprehensive, results-focused, full-funnel marketer. Call it whatever you want, but focus on the bottom line and plug whatever gaps you think you have at driving actual business outcomes.

That's what we're paid for. And if this era is a threat and marketing teams go from five down to three, you hear all these like shy, like scary stories. Who's left? It's the results focused, data-driven marketer that understands the audience and keeps the sales team happy and can report up to the C-suite.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm.

Andy Crestodina: Great, great. So that then you stop thinking about channels and acronyms and you know this metric or that metric. You're bottom line focused. That's security, that's performance. That's that's the point of you know, that's why we should be getting up in the morning.

Priscilla McKinney: Hm. You know, one quick question. Did you read the book, the book "Range" by any chance? It it's really about kind of takes that ten thousand hours kind of gets gets, you know, specific, like really and even, you know, other people have really, you know, kind of debunked the ten thousand hour myth or something like that.

But the thing about "Range" is this idea of becoming more multidisciplinary as a person. And so understanding how, you know, people who tinker typically over the long run will do better as opposed to the people who just like, but I do SEO and that's what I've been good at and that's what I know how to affect. And, you know, so that's my short version. You don't need to read the book, but it all has all the science to back it up.

Andy Crestodina: Mm-hmm. Totally agree. We we're coming out of an era when deep expertise and specialization was the benefit, was was the win. You know, I need to know everything in the world about corporate tax attorney stuff. Like whatever.

Like now we're in an era when probably the the generalist has an advantage because you can so quick if your perspective's broad, you can very quickly acquire skills. It this what's happening now? I know copywriters who are doing design, and I know designers who are doing programming and I know marketers who are doing data analysis at levels that weren't that weren't happening a year ago.

So, no, it's a really interesting question. I think about this when I talk to college students who aren't sure what to study. I think that this era really benefits the the breadth more than the depth. I did things last night.

Like I connected hundreds of analytics accounts to Google Sheets and then tagged all this data and exported it for analysis. Like it's pages and pages of code it took to do that. These are app scripts, like stuff I'd never would have, never would have considered.

A year ago I was like, hey guys, do we have a developer with extra time? I could use, you know, we could build some stuff. I don't need that anymore. I don't need a developer. Yeah, I can make stuff I mean these hack, you little vibe-coded tools, but they're powerful.

So yeah, I think that the this is a strange time and I am realizing more and more that the tinkerer has an edge.

Priscilla McKinney: The tinkerer has an edge, and also what we need to do is train ourselves. We need to train our mindset to think about how to use these tools in order to tinker. And there is a playfulness to it. There does need to be a little bit of freedom.

Not to give this book you know, the full shout out, but one of the other things in there was that in an environment that is, you know, kind as opposed to being

Andy Crestodina: Mm-hmm.

Priscilla McKinney: Well, he says kind versus wicked, but it's this idea of this tolerance for learning, this tolerance for what? My gosh, what? Tell me how'd you do that? And that's really to me the Andy Crestodina way been like, let me just show you how I did that.

You've been like that for me. This is why we're friends, right? And it's like, you talk about it, and instead of trying to sit on a high, you know, pedestal of like, I know how to do it, like, let me show you how I did it. You know, and someone else can pause it and like, but I would have done it this a different way and that quick flexibility to change, you know, the system.

And I do think that's what it needs on this continuum right now with SEO and AEO and everything else. So I really appreciate that. And I I love I love the shout out for Insights Marketing Day. Of course, if you don't have your ticket already, you do not want to miss this.

Specifically, Andy's gonna be talking about, you know, what you do when you do want AI to actually recommend your brand, and that's very brass tacks. But in the environment there, we're having people talking about sales. I'm talking about frameworks. We have someone else talking about specifically how to pivot your your business and your skill set based on AI.

So you know, of course, we're gonna end with a really happy Mark Hans who brings everybody up into a good mood and he's gonna really help us put it all together, you know, and say, okay, well, I just got overwhelmed. What do I do walking out this door? But I think to your point, it's about really creating this environment inside yourself of just this playfulness and then networking in a way where you can play with your colleagues. You don't have to know it all. And I I love that approach.

Andy Crestodina: Yeah. It's it it it's a it's one of the most common questions. Where do you go to learn? What are you reading? I get the most value from little conversations with other other experimenters, other people trying stuff.

I do lots of little one on one calls to trade notes and share prompts and show methods. And the the other getting offline, let's all meet in person. Those are relationships, that's immune to all disruption.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Andy Crestodina: But finally, and maybe everyone's already figured this out, but the best way to learn AI is to talk to AI. The second glass of wine you're gonna have is when you go deep. It's is when it's like you don't need to follow AI news.

I ignore all AI news. Don't click at all. Don't care. That doesn't doesn't help me do my job. But I do have a trained Claude project that's an an advisor that's help helps me think of, you know, new ways to do orchestration, like words I never used.

Priscilla McKinney: I'm I'm listening.

Andy Crestodina: Like go to market strategy, like things that and it has all of my data. It has my ICPs, it has sales call transcripts, it's got my CRM stuff in there. Like I can do signal-based marketing analysis I've gotten from other things, transcripts from cool webinars I saw.

Ask AI to help you meet your goals and just keep that conversation going and go deeper and give it more inputs. And it I think that it is AI is the ultimate tool for learning AI in this new era.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm, that's a great, that's a great just a a challenge for all of us. Andy, I could talk with you all day. You know it. I know it. So thank you so much for all of your time.

I'm gonna see you at Insights Marketing Day, but a huge thank you for all the ways that you really set a tone in this industry and help us all learn. Make sure that you sign up for his newsletter. The LinkedIn newsletter is fantastic.

Of course, the Orbit Media Studios blog, which we'll attach here, is fantastic, but you need to be following him on LinkedIn. To his point, you know, he's looking from a lot of different sources and then he's bringing that and really, you know, codifying it down into what could I do today? And that's always just an amazing approach. Andy Crestodina, thanks for joining me on the perch.

Andy Crestodina: Glad to be at the perch again with you, Priscilla, anytime. And I will be seeing you soon. Insights Marketing Day. Come to Chicago.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, it's gonna be awesome. From all the peeps sorry. Okay, hold on, I gotta pause it. From all the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing, have a great day and happy marketing.