Filling the Void: How AI Identifies and Closes Content Gaps with Andy Crestodina

Have you ever wondered why some of your content just doesn’t perform as expected, no matter how much effort you put into it? Identification and management of content gaps often elude even the most experienced marketers, leading to wasted resources and missed opportunities. Traditionally, pinpointing these gaps has been a substantial challenge, requiring extensive analysis and sometimes leading to imprecise conclusions.

Enter the power of Artificial Intelligence. AI isn’t just transforming industries; it’s revolutionizing how we analyze and optimize our marketing strategies, making it a critical tool for any marketer aiming for precision and effectiveness in their content planning.

That’s exactly what Andy Crestodina, our guest today and a seasoned digital marketing strategist, specializes in. As the Chief Marketing Officer and Co-Founder of Orbit Media Studios, Andy leverages AI not only to detect but also to fill the crucial gaps in content strategies effectively. With his two decades of insight, Andy will share powerful tactics that help marketers enhance their content’s impact through smart, AI-driven decisions.

AI in Marketing: Unpacked host Mike Allton asked Andy Crestodina about:

✨ Understanding AI-Driven Content Gap Analysis: Learn how AI can illuminate hidden gaps in content strategies, enabling marketers to fine-tune their efforts for better engagement and effectiveness.

✨ Real-world Impact of AI on Marketing Outcomes: Gain insights from Andy’s experiences on how employing AI to address content gaps has tangibly improved marketing results, providing a clear path for listeners to understand the potential ROI of incorporating AI tools.

✨ Demystifying AI in Content Marketing: Andy will address common myths and misconceptions about using AI in marketing, offering practical advice and tips for integrating AI into daily marketing practices responsibly and effectively.

Learn more about Andy Crestodina

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

Full Transcript

(lightly edited)

Filling the Void: How AI Identifies and Closes Content Gaps with Andy Crestodina

[00:00:00] Andy Crestodina: I can actually build a persona using AI,, or give it a persona if I have one, and then give it a page. And the, the prompt sort of wrote itself after I realized like this might be an opportunity. , to what extent does this page meet or not meet the information needs of this persona? You take a full page screenshot, give it a webpage, and if the persona is accurate, it’ll tell you.

See, the gap analysis is an excellent use case for AI because Human brains are not very good at saying what’s not there. Daniel Kahneman wrote the book, thinking fast and slow. And he said, what you see is all there is, you know, it takes an expert conversion strategist to look at a thing and say, well, that’s missing from this page, but AI has no trouble at all.

So,, that was one of the moments when I saw, Oh, I can write a prompt that will audit key pages to find, you know, unanswered questions, unaddressed objections,, pages that lack supportive evidence, you know, unsupported marketing claims.

[00:00:58] Mike Allton: Welcome to AI in Marketing: unpacked, where we simplify AI for impactful marketing. I’m your host, Mike Allton here to guide you through the world of artificial intelligence and its transformative impact on marketing strategies. Each episode, we’ll break down AI concepts into manageable insights and explore practical applications that can supercharge your marketing efforts.

Whether you’re an experienced marketer just starting to explore the potential of AI, this podcast will equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to succeed. So tune in and let’s unlock the power of AI together.

[00:01:31] Mike Allton: Greetings program. Welcome back to AI in Marketing: Unpacked where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at keeping up with integrating or layering artificial intelligence into social media, content, advertising, search, and other areas of digital marketing. Oh, and you get to learn to subscribe to be shown how to prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution and come out ahead.

Now, have you ever wondered why some of your content just doesn’t perform as expected, no matter how much effort. You put into it identification and management of content gaps often allude even the most experienced marketers leading to wasted resources and missed opportunities. Traditionally, pinpointing these gaps has been a substantial challenge, requiring extensive analysis and sometimes leading to imprecise Conclusions enter the power of artificial intelligence.

AI isn’t just transforming industries. It’s revolutionizing how we analyze and optimize our marketing strategies, making it a critical tool for any marketer aiming for precision and effectiveness in their content planning. And that’s exactly what Andy Crestodina, our guest today in a season, digital marketing strategist specializes in as the chief marketing officer and co founder of orbit media studios, Andy leverages AI, not only to detect, but also fill the crucial gaps in content strategies.

Effectively with his decades of insight, and he will share powerful tactics that help marketers enhance their content impact through smart AI driven decisions. Hey, Andy, welcome to the show.

[00:02:56] Andy Crestodina: I love that. Mike, what energy I’m ready? I’m pumped. This is going to be such a great conversation. Thanks for having me.

[00:03:03] Mike Allton: Thanks for coming on. There’s so much that I can’t wait to literally learn from you, but first start off, if you don’t mind, just. Kick things off and share how your journey in digital marketing led you to embrace AI technologies.

[00:03:16] Andy Crestodina: Yeah. So co founder of a digital agency focused on websites going back to 2000 and 2001 so many, many years of SEO and analytics and, and also content strategy, blogging, email, marketing, social media, influencer marketing, when AI comes along, it was obviously going to be a big change.

Everyone kind of looked at that and saw it. And I, I knew I had the choice right in that moment to, you know, Embrace this and be ready to meet my audience’s information needs knowing it would be a big topic or kind of defer, wait or see if it’s in the, you know, product development pipeline for the tools I use.

So I jumped in and more or less what I discovered is that I I can get some fantastic results mostly by using AI to do the things that I’ve always done. help with SEO and help with analyzing data and help with content strategy and help with better understanding an audience and help with conversion optimization.

So I am all in and have spent hundreds of hours researching options and refining prompts. And now I’m doing lots of speaking and teaching and writing and recording on a I topics. And I think we’re gonna Jump into some of my favorite tricks today.

[00:04:26] Mike Allton: Yeah. And I love that you dove in right from the start.

I’ll be honest and say, I did not. I was very reluctant at first. It wasn’t until I heard Paul Roetzer say that it’s not going to replace your job as a marketer markers who you as AI are going to replace you and that stopped me cold. And it was probably, I don’t know, late 2023 that I heard him say that and I was like, Oh man, that feels.

That feels very prescient to me. So that’s when I started to dive in and what I’d love to know from you because we’re talking about content gaps. So when did it actually occur to you or what sparked your interest in using AI to identify content gaps?

[00:05:07] Andy Crestodina: Yeah. So we build lots of websites. They’re almost all B2B lead generation websites.

And so part of my job is to help my team and help clients build pages that Convert visitors into leads. Pages convert visitors and leads when they answer the visitor’s top questions and address the visitor’s objections. Then they use evidence to support those answers and then give a call to action. So the structure of a high performing B2B lead gen page is answer evidence, answer evidence, call to action.

What good is AI? Hey, take it. Wait a second. I can actually build a persona using AI or give it a persona if I have one and then give it a page. And the prompt sort of wrote itself after I realized like this might be an opportunity. To what extent does this page meet or not meet the information needs of this persona?

You take a full page screenshot, give it a web page. And if the persona is accurate, it’ll tell you it’s very, see, gap analysis is an excellent app, excellent use case for AI because human brains are not very good at seeing what’s not there. There’s a Daniel Kahneman wrote the book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

And he said what you see is all there is, you know, it takes an expert conversion strategist to look at a thing and say, well, that’s missing from this page. But AI has no trouble at all. So that was one of the moments when I saw, oh, I can write a prompt that will audit key pages to find unanswered questions, unaddressed objections, pages that lack supportive evidence, you know, unsupported marketing claims.

Weak calls to action just, you know, and so a lot of my prompts after I traded on the persona look like tiny blog posts about best practices for a thing. And then you give it the prompt and you go for the thing and you say, how could this be a better thing? And it gives you backstop that some of it’s useless.

Like, well, I purposely didn’t address that. It’s not my audience, you know, or, you know, there’s good reasons why I didn’t. You know, check that box, but there’s almost always one or two that you know, you’ll see him and you’ll be like, oops, how did I miss that? How did I miss that? I need to include that.

And I can give you tons of examples.

[00:07:18] Mike Allton: Well, first, thanks for pointing out that. Through your prompts, you’re actually demonstrating a best practice there in itself, which you’re, you’re actually giving the AI a lot of information on what to do, what not to do, do it this way, do it that way, those instructions that we might give an intern any kind of a solid SOP and say, this is what I want, because the more you time you invest up front and instructing, the better the results are going to be.

But talk to us about kind of the technology and the processes behind how the AI identifies these kinds of gaps.

[00:07:50] Andy Crestodina: Yeah. So it’s. It’s key to first give it the persona or let it create a persona for you. So the persona prompt here, I’ll give you a, I’ll just kind of summarize it here. We can put it in show notes if you want, but it, it sort of sounds like this.

Build me a persona of a job title with certain roles and responsibilities at a industry company size or geography. These are like fill in the blank. This person’s looking for help with a challenge or problem or task, and they’re considering your product or service. Okay. So that’s basically like the, the general idea behind, you know, we’re training it on who we’re talking to.

And then I asked for four specific things, tell me their hopes and dreams, their fears and concerns, their emotional triggers. and list out the decision criteria for selecting my company. Or a company like mine or a company, my category, and that gives you this persona and it’s partly wrong, which is fine.

Don’t fix it. I assume I joke like AI might as well stand for assuming correct, because it’s, it’s definitely not going to be perfectly accurate on the first shot. So you have to go refine it and prove it. Our mutual friend, Ardath Albee looked at my persona prompt and was aghast. She’s like, Andy, you don’t know if that’s accurate.

Ardath, you’re right. I agree. I have to improve it, check it, validate. Anyway. So now you’ve trained it on the audience. If you don’t do that first, you’re not going to get anything good. I honestly believe that a lot of people are using AI in a very lazy way. Until you give it your target audience and information about who you’re trying to reach, AI might as well stand for average information.

I, I play with the term, with the letters A and I. AI really, it is basically average information. It ingested the internet and it comes back and gives you the summary of the internet. It’s generalizing what it found. So you have to train it on your audience and then talk to it about content strategy, blog posts, calls to action, webpage, whatever, anything.

So now in the same prompt where you, where you create it and then improved the persona it gave you the next prompt is when you give it that full, I, I like to use a full page screenshot. I use a chrome extension called Go full page. And it takes a giant picture of the screen, like the whole thing. It’s a, there’s some flaws with it because what if there’s tabs or expandable accordion content areas.

But so none of this is perfect, but that next prompt, the, the audit my page prompt great for homepages. I can’t think of a reason why everyone shouldn’t do this like today. It is like a, the prompt is pretty detailed and again, I can share, but it says you’re a conversion optimization expert skilled and evaluating pages.

against their ability to inform and persuade. The most compelling highest converting webpages share some common traits. These are the best practices for B2B service pages. The header clearly indicates the topic of the page. The copy answers questions, addresses objections. The order of the messages aligns with the visitor’s prioritized information needs.

The copy uses supportive evidence to support the marketing claims, testimonial statistics, case studies, awards, sub heads are clear and specific and meaningful. The page connects on a personal level with human elements like bases and names it leverages cognitive biases. It provides compelling calls to action.

So my prompt is like a tiny, it’s, it’s everything I’ve learned in 23 years of visitor psychology experience. And then it comes back and and then the bottom of the prompt basically says short, create a list showing the ways in which the copy doesn’t does and does not meet the information needs. The persona suggest changes that would make it a more helpful, more compelling, higher converting page.

I did this the other day with a company. It’s a, it’s a school. It was, it’s a chiropractic school and it came back and said, this page failed to tell the visitor how long the program is. Oops. Okay.

[00:11:40] Mike Allton: Wow.

[00:11:40] Andy Crestodina: Wait. We didn’t mention it’s a three year program. Oh my gosh. It sort of did. Yeah. You know, or, you know, the persona’s number one concern is, is this an accredited university?

It did say it was accredited and AI pointed out it did say that, but when we look closer at the page, again, assuming correct, you have to look closely. You have to look over its shoulder all the time. We did mention that it was accredited, but that was almost the last thing on the page. So before the end of the meeting, I’m doing this with a client on a call.

They updated the page. It’s like click refresh. We fixed it. Now, the very first thing on the page is become a chiropractor in three years from a top accredited university. Like that’s actually why they’re on the page. So all of our pages have gaps. It’s very hard to find a gap unless you’re an expert conversion optimizer with 24 years of experience.

But AI is a skills leveling tool, and you no longer need 24 years of conversion optimization experience to make that a higher converting page. You can just use that persona prompt and that conversion prompt and, you know, take or leave whatever it suggests, but it’s likely there’s a few things in there that will move the needle.

[00:12:52] Mike Allton: I love that. AI is a skills leveling tool. I don’t know if you’ve said that before. It’s the first time I’ve heard that. I appreciate that perspective. I’m going to clip that out as a quote graphic, in fact. But what are some of the more surprising content gaps that AI has kind of helped you identify?

We chuckled at the three year program. That sounds like it’s, like, mandatory information. What else have you unearthed?

[00:13:15] Andy Crestodina: There’s one trick you can use where humans literally AI only method Which is when you say what are the most, what are the most important topics that are the least likely to be covered by the big blogs in my industry?

It’ll tell you where do the counter narrative opinions. That are least likely to be discussed by thought leaders in my industry. It will tell you in other words, AI can do gap analysis, not on your, not just on your page, but it can do gap analysis on all the work ever created in your entire category, like your whole vertical it’s read everything in your vertical.

And it’ll tell you which things are least likely. In other words, what’s most likely to get traction on social trigger conversation. Yeah. I have some prompts that are sort of like this, Tell me some provocative, but mundane, almost trivial topics that people in my industry feel very strongly about.

They’ll tell you like exactly what topics are not controversial, but very very triggering of engagement. It’s like incredible. Like it just shows you like, it just tells you in seconds. I don’t know that a human could really do that. You’d have to have read everything and lived in that industry, that vertical forever.

There’s so, Mike, there’s a lot of fun little techniques like this. The, the list goes on. You can actually give it your, your mark, your strategic assets, not even public things, but you could just say, here’s my ideal client profile, what’s missing. Here’s my content strategy. What’s missing. You know, here’s my, here’s my LinkedIn profile.

And the job description for my ideal job, what’s missing. I think it’s, it’s a cool way to do analysis because it’s not. You’re not abdicating the things you love about your job. You’re just using AI to quickly uncover opportunities to just 10 X the quality of whatever you’re working on. I don’t know you, even if you are angry about AI is labor market impact or accuracy or bias or sociological, you know, implications.

So what this one? I can’t think of a reason that a good marketer would not use those methods.

[00:15:27] Mike Allton: I couldn’t agree more. And I’d like to back up for just a second. Which tool or platforms are you using to do these analyses?

[00:15:36] Andy Crestodina: Boy, I’m trying to keep it vanilla. Mike, you can appreciate this because you and I meet a lot of people and I’m trying not to be an advocate for a tool.

I’m actually just, in all my examples, I just use ChatGPT because it’s accessible and people have it. It, but I’m, I’m sure there are others. So, Jay, our friend Jay Baer says, you know, it’s about the wizard, not the wand. So, I don’t know the difference as much, and I have not invested in a fancy tool.

I’m doing everything with just the off the shelf ChatGPT, although I do have a paid account. Chat GPT plus allows me to upload these full page screenshots, you know, it’ll draw charts for me. Another fun trick is and I think this is only possible with a plus account create for me a color, a colorful heap map matrix that shows the extent to which I met or did not meet the information needs of my visitor.

And then it draws, it makes a chart that shows like your visitors prioritized information needs on the left. And then like a cut, like colored cells to show like, Ooh. That’s a bright red. I think I need to update my page. Some of these things are like, how come you didn’t talk about post launch support, you know, or, you know, the service warranties are, you know you know, there’s it across industries, there’s some common things, but mostly it’s different depending on the, on the brand and on the, on the audience.

[00:17:01] Mike Allton: That’s really fascinating. And you make a good point as of the moment, as at the time of recording this, you need to have a paid Chet GPT account, or probably a paid any, Platform account, or did this level of analysis? This isn’t simple AI generative AI kind of stuff. We want it to be able to look at entire websites and pages.

We want it to be able to look at images and understand and comprehend the information that’s in there. So you need to spend. A little bit of money, but not a lot. We’re talking with Andy Crestodina folks, about identifying and addressing the kinds of content gaps that can really impact your marketing. And I’ve got a few more questions for any that you’re not gonna want to miss, but first I’d like to share with you a quick message about my preferred AI tool, Magai.

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Don’t just market market smarter with Magai tap the link in the show notes. So you mentioned earlier, you’re using AI to improve the things that you’re already doing. A lot of the work that you’re already doing, how has. AI kind of improved the outcomes when it comes to addressing these kinds of gaps.

[00:19:05] Andy Crestodina: Boy, I wish I had a better measurement for these things. It’s just become part of a process. So I don’t have a lot of pre post data to show the before and after of a conversion optimization improvement specifically from AI. All of our projects are all about improving the cheese in the mousetrap. We built sites that are optimized to rank in search and optimized to convert visitors into leads.

So I’m used to seeing big lift from these kinds of things. What AI did and what it’s doing for a lot of us is just becoming one more step in a process to double check to confirm that we didn’t miss anything. Eventually I’ve been able to publish. The difference in in a I powered conversion copywriting process versus one.

That’s all human. I’m a bit squeamish about that now because it’s still unclear to what extent are our audiences. Want us to use AI? This is a question for you, Mike. I mean, when do you is the buyer ready to hear a message that says, of course we use AI for research for every project? Or are they more you know, concerned that we’re using AI and would rather have us do everything by hand?

Still unknown.

[00:20:11] Mike Allton: Yeah, and it definitely depends on who you’re talking to, right? Is it someone who’s been following AI? And to your point earlier, maybe they’re concerned about the sociological impact of artificial intelligence, or maybe they’re concerned about privacy. And they’re like, wait a minute, you’re putting our data into a page, even though you’re taking a public Facing, you know, website and who cares?

Everyone else can see it. But still, there are those potential concerns. Or you’ve got people like me to be like, yeah, do it. I want to see what it can do. I want to see how much better it can perform. You’re absolutely right.

[00:20:42] Andy Crestodina: Yeah, it’s a fun time to be it’s also in flux, right? To what extent should service providers put AI into their marketing messages?

I actually did a survey, did a tiny survey about this partnered with question pro. We got 1100 people to answer this survey. It’s like, do you want your doctor to use AI? No, I want an all human doctor or I want a human doctor that uses AI to check or an AI doctor checked by a human or I want a robot doctor.

And it looks like there’s 30 some percent of people are still preferring the all human approach. Which is strange because really AI has been baked into a lot of things. For a long time, people say that, you know, 30 percent of people want their, their airline pilot to just be human, even though airplanes are mostly flown through computers, like it’s your, your pilots, not really flying the plane as much as you might think.

So I think that there’s consumers still don’t even know yet, you know, just how, how these things are becoming part of the. You know, the best practices for service providers across all kinds of categories.

[00:21:50] Mike Allton: So let’s, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about misperceptions in content marketing specifically.

That’s our area of expertise. What are some of the common misconceptions that, you know, people are kind of floating around or they’re worried about when it comes to AI and content marketing that you’d like to address?

[00:22:08] Andy Crestodina: I think that there is they, they appear on both ends of the spectrum. There are marketers who think that AI simply cannot write high quality content and there are readers who think that you know you know, AI, AI driven content is going to ruin the internet.

I think that the most, really the job of the strategist is to ask what’s the right tool for the right job. We’ve always used tools, right? People have used Grammarly forever and there’s all spell check and, you know, tools have helped us do writing forever, where I think that one of the I did a post recently that said there is such a thing as commodity content and for certain things you should, AI should do them, humans should not do them.

If you need a thousand alt tags to make your site more accessible for people with disabilities, you should not write those. There are tools that will write a thousand alt tags for you in half an hour and then your site’s more accessible. Other things are human only, right? You have a personal point of view.

AI doesn’t really have opinions, right? You can say like, this is the right way to do something. That’s the wrong way to do something. Those are feelings like, and sometimes like, again, there are mundane topics, like the Oxford comma, everyone’s got an opinion. Just hearing those syllables, Oxford comma, you got triggered, right?

We all do. You know, so, I posted this thing and there were people who said, there’s no such thing as commodity content. Everything should always be done by humans. Hmm. Okay. And there’s other like AI advocates and evangelists who are saying, no, AI does have opinions. Hmm. Really? No. What does AI care about deeply?

You know, nothing. Ask it. It has no personal experience. It cares about nothing. So in this post, I actually put the you might like this. Do you remember the scene in Goodwill hunting when Robin Williams and Matt Damon are on the park bench and he said, you know the, the, the doctor, the, the, the therapist was like, you know, I thought of something which is that you have no, you’re just a kid.

You have no experiences. Right? If I asked you about war, you’d quote Shakespeare or, you know, you if I asked you about love, you’d, you know, you’d, you’d throw a sod out at me, but you’ve never, you’ve never been vulnerable. You’ve never had a life experience. You don’t have any, any, you don’t know what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel.

That’s AI. It has no light variance. It has no point of it has no real point of view. It has no perspective or opinion or thoughts. A. I cannot create thought leadership content because thought leadership creates tension. It’s about having a it’s about sticking your neck out, right? Taking a chance planning a flag.

What is a I going to argue about? But what is it for? What is it against? What does it believe? What is it? Not that you have to try very hard to prompt it to give an opinion type answer But I don’t think AI cares about anything at all. You and I care about tons of things, Mike. We’re going to, you’re going to, we’re going to meet up and we’re, we’re going to get a cocktail and you know, you, you like one and I like one.

And there, and we have points of view there and the smell and the flavor and the background and the story behind that, right? These are, this is the human experience. AI cannot create thought leadership content. That’s my assertion. And humans should not create commodity content. That’s my assertion. But there’s people who would disagree with both of those.

Which is fun. Let’s have the debate.

[00:25:32] Mike Allton: That’s funny because I did see that post, but I didn’t see all the commentary. So I didn’t see that back and forth that was going, which is fascinating. But to your point, yeah, I found a tool that I’m using in my website that identifies for me, once I’ve published a new piece of content, all the other Old articles that could link to that brand new piece of content.

And it helps me identify places within that new piece of content to link back to all the old, obviously I can do that. I’ve been talking to people about deep linking and forward linking for over a decade, but. Do I take the time to go back and edit 40 pieces of content to link to a brand new piece? Of course not.

Of course not. So the AI is truly helping there. That’s, that’s kind of an example, but I’d love for you to share just real quick examples of what you mean by commodity content. I want to make sure people are clear about that.

[00:26:24] Andy Crestodina: Yeah. Something like something where it’s not mostly for your typical visitor or for most, mostly for humans.

Here’s an example you, a large, these are pretty obvious examples, but large scale website, there are 10, 000 URLs you do a crawl and there’s 600 URLs that have no meta description. Okay. Someone should write 600 meta descriptions, go look at these pages and summarize the pages with 155 word summaries for meta descriptions.

Why should a human waste their life doing that? Or I do overnights. You spend a month. Writing e commerce product descriptions for minor variations of color and size. Like it was a weird site where those were different URLs. What, why would anybody do that? YouTube descriptions, I would argue are not mostly for humans.

Sure. Some people will click, but it’s not, or I’ll get, we’re on a podcast. I’ll give you an example for podcasting. I’m an insomniac. So many of us are, if I can’t sleep, I listened to a sleep podcast. The sleep podcast I listened to as a little custom thumbnail for every, every episode. It’s like this guy reading these boring old stories about, you know, detective novel stuff, right?

In a very calming voice, it said like a hypnosis podcast where he reads boring books. I love it. But that custom thumbnail, if you look at them, they’re AI generated. Why not? Would you pay an artist 600 bucks? That’s the low end a thousand dollars to make a human handmade painting to be the custom thumbnail for each episode of your sleep podcast.

No one chooses a sleep podcast based on those images, right? So it’s not an important thing. It’s adjacent to the piece. It’s like my example in that article was hotel room art. I hope to God no human has hand painted every piece of art in these 600 room hotels. Those should be prints, right? It’s commodity.

It’s not, you didn’t choose the room for the, for the art anyway. Hopefully. Yeah. Hopefully.

[00:28:30] Mike Allton: Yeah. No, that’s fantastic. Yeah. And I appreciate that perspective is I, I couldn’t agree with you more now. I want to kind of change the direction of the conversation a little bit, a little Make a little more forward thinking.

What are you excited about or even scared about that you might be thinking is coming with AI, particularly in marketing, just in the next 6 to 12 months, because I can’t ask anybody to look more than 12 months out because they’re just going to be dead wrong.

[00:28:55] Andy Crestodina: Yeah. If I believe that every day, thousands of people are discovering that to get simple answers or basic questions that a browser plus search engine plus website is not a good way to do that.

It’s very noisy. You get, you download a lot of files. He didn’t need, there’s lots of marketing tracking codes. You just put on your device, you got a lot of it’s visually a disaster pop up windows and accept cookies and black notifications and sticky headers and footers and videos on top of videos. It’s a mess, especially on mobile.

We are all slowly learning that AI apps are a great use case, simpler, faster, lighter weight, more private, just easier ways to get simple answers to questions. So along with Gartner, who predicted a 25 percent drop in total global search volume, in other words, a 25 percent decrease in the use of search engines.

And, you know, accordingly, like a drop in the use of browsers, probably I think that the use of search engines will decline for many use cases for looking for information and 10 queries. We’re going to prompt instead of querying and that I will change how humans use the Internet. Even in the next six to 12 months.

And that if that’s concerning for you, if you get a lot of search traffic keep in mind some of that stuff that you’re getting traffic from might just be basic human knowledge that nobody should have been able to monetize to begin with, and also AI might become a source of traffic. Go look at your analytics.

You might be getting traffic from AI websites because there are citations and people do want to click to look at the source and get, get a sense for who that publisher was, or, you know, is that a supported thing? You know, how credible is that thing they found within AI? So I predict that there’ll be a shift.

For many, for many use cases from browser plus search plus website, just simply to an AI app because it’s just a far, far better experience, especially on mobile.

[00:30:52] Mike Allton: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I’ve started to see perplexity. com and some other providers as, as a referral source but I know exactly what you’re talking about.

My number one trafficked article for the last decade has been how to mention and tag people on Facebook. Hmm. It’s ridiculous. I, I don’t know why I wrote this huge tactical guide years ago, but Yeah,

[00:31:17] Andy Crestodina: yeah. So let me ask, would you would you be heartbroken if you got less traffic to that post

[00:31:22] Mike Allton: today?

No. 10 years ago when I thought it was important that I was writing and documenting all these things. Yeah. But looking back now, I realize that article is not leading to business. It’s not, it’s. General Facebook users who probably aren’t even business owners who don’t know how to tag somebody on Facebook.

That’s not my target audience That’s just flooding to the site I mean hundreds of these people every single day are coming to learn how to mention somebody or remove a tag because my ex boyfriend Tagged me on a picture. It’s ridiculous and it’s not helping me and that’s a perfect example I think of the kind of question that AI will hopefully help these people and so yeah I’m gonna see less traffic it should but It’s not going to impact my actual business.

[00:32:01] Andy Crestodina: It won’t. Yes. Thank you. That, that, that’s a key point and I, and I should have gone there right away. What I’m finding is that the, the, the pages on these websites, and I have access to 500 analytics accounts, the pages on these websites that are less impacted by the drop in click through rates from search, and by the way, click through rates from search have been dropping for, for, for five years or longer, those pages are far, the commercial intent phrases are far less That bring people to the money pages that have, from which the visitors do convert very low impact because those visitors had visit website intent.

If the visitor is trying to get to a website, they’ll still use search and they’ll still click and they’ll still land and they still may convert. So mostly the impact in the drop in traffic from Google generally making search results so noisy or from visitors moving from search to AI. It’s going to affect the vanity metric of top line traffic, which is mostly from.

Information intent phrases to simple, helpful, basic information, blog posts. Of course that will go away, but I don’t think it’s going to affect lead gen for most brands.

[00:33:09] Mike Allton: Yeah. Yeah. Another post was how to link to a Facebook post. Okay, great. People come to that site, my blog, they learn right. Mouse click the date and then you got it.

And then, and then the back and then they never come to my site again. But yeah, that’s something, you know, I worked My day jobs at Agorapulse, and this is something we’re identifying and talking through. You know, how do we create more bottom of funnel content? You know, more content that to your point, you know, people have actual search intent, hopefully intent to buy once, once they click through on that kind of a search query.

[00:33:39] Andy Crestodina: That’s what matters. That’s where we, and that’s that content gap thing I started with was all about that. Exactly. How to convert people who have, you know, the commercial intent. Visitor who needs what you do. Like that’s the game. Like those pages are worth not just 10 X, like a hundred X or more to your brand.

Just go, go into GA for create a comparison showing visitors started on a blog post versus visitors who started on a service page. And then just scroll down and look at the conversion. Now it’s called the key event rate. Look at the key event rate. It’s like 10 to 20 X on most, most accounts that I’m seeing.

It’s so tight. So that’s really where we should be working hardest. And by the way, when that page is just more detailed and comprehensive, that’s also training the AI in the future. Think of you because your page. Set everything about what you do is another implication for a I is that we have to think about the content we put out there is actually training data for the next version of these a I tools.

And as such, your site had better be the number one place for everything related to your brand. You need to answer every question that you can about your company. Your linkedin profile should be less exhaustive than your team bio page. Right. You’re that directory listing or your Google my business page.

No way for the hours, the company size or your revenue or number of employees like that, your site should be by far the most informative place on the internet. That’s going to train the AI and that’s going to make you a better landing page for that visitor.

[00:35:11] Mike Allton: That’s such a huge point. Thanks for bringing it all back around to content gaps.

That’s fantastic. What final advice, tips, or best practices do you have for marketers who kind of working to get up to speed with AI, whether it’s personally or professionally?

[00:35:27] Andy Crestodina: If you’re on a team, I would create a shared prompt library. Ours is just in Google docs. So the prompts that you know to be effective and you’ve kind of battle tested them, you know, move them from the folder of beta prompts into the ready for primetime approved prompts and then make sure that everyone has access to those.

I think also it’s a good time to experiment with tools. You mentioned a sponsor. I’m going to be looking at that. That’s an excellent we all need to kind of keep an open mind about what we are what we’re using and it’s such a dynamic era we’re in. So don’t be too hesitant to jump into another, another use case and another tool.

I also think that, We shouldn’t worry as much as people say about the memory of AI. If you upload your GA4 data, which has no personally identifiable information in it anyway. I do that a lot. I upload GA4 data to AI only from my own account, but in my experience, it doesn’t remember stuff for very long at all.

So I would disabuse yourself of the fear that if you upload it, you know, your social media marketing data, you know, or your analytics from whatever tool that someone else is gonna be able to see it someday. No way. I mean, go make a sandwich, come back and ask it. If it still remembers, it probably forgot.

So I am completely unafraid of a long term memory. In my experience, it’s pretty awful.

[00:36:46] Mike Allton: Yeah, that’s a great point. And to kind of underscore that one of the things I tell people a lot is to make sure that you’ve got some kind of committee, probably more than one person, at least internally, that’s thinking about how your entire team is using AI and looking at the tools, looking at the policies and the processes, make sure that somebody isn’t experimenting with sharing proprietary information on an open AI or an open chat bot to your point.

Probably not going to be a big deal today, but you never know. And you need to have somebody who’s paying attention to that. Just like you’d have somebody in a larger organization paying attention to any tools that you might subscribe to and making sure, Oh, wait, we don’t need three different subscriptions to this same tool.

We can add a team member, you know, those are the kinds of things that I think more and more people need to be doing. So I appreciate that you brought that up, Andy, this has been Absolutely. Fantastic. I don’t know. We just scratched the surface for all this stuff for folks who want to learn more about you and and follow your journey with AI.

Where can they go to find you?

[00:37:47] Andy Crestodina: Well, Mike, you and I are members of a lot of the same communities. So come hang out with Both of us at an event we’re, we’re, we kind of travel in those, in that same world, the marketing process B2B forum, content marketing world, social media marketing world, and a lot of those that, that all the related places.

So we are the ones who show up so you can find us in person at those. All over. But online, I would say LinkedIn is my best social network. So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. There’s a follow button, but you can skip that and click the dots and go to the connect button. If you want to chat with me and with a DM orbitmedia.

com is where I publish everything. I publish first. I write one article every two weeks and you can find it. And if you subscribe there, you’ll get them all first. Other than that. You know, reach out if we can help with anything related to websites. Orbit is a, is a digital agency, 100 percent focused on web development and website optimization.

I’ve got a book, I’ve got a YouTube channel, all the, all the things, Mike, all the places. The usuals.

[00:38:46] Mike Allton: Terrific. Thank you, Andy. We’ll have all those links in the show notes and he’s right. He and I first met in person at content marketing world in 2015 folks. So I I’ve had the pleasure of running into Andy multiple times since then, but that’s all we’ve got for today.

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