AI search is dominating headlines—but what if the real data tells a very different story? In this episode, Conductor’s Patrick Reinhart breaks down a massive benchmark study revealing that AI currently drives only about 1% of web traffic. If you want to understand what’s hype, what’s real, and how SEO is evolving in the AI era, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.
https://page2pod.com - AI search is exploding in hype, but what does the data actually say?
In this episode of the Page 2 Podcast, Jon Clark and Joe DeVita sit down with Patrick Reinhart, VP of Services & Thought Leadership at Conductor, to unpack one of the largest AEO and GEO benchmark studies ever conducted. After analyzing millions of prompts and billions of sessions, the surprising finding was that AI referral traffic currently accounts for only about 1% of total web traffic.
So why are companies reorganizing teams and shifting budgets toward AI optimization?
Patrick explains how AI search isn’t really about traffic (yet)**—it’s about **brand visibility, citations, sentiment, and authority across large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini. As traditional search and AI search converge, marketing teams must learn how to optimize for both ecosystems simultaneously.
The conversation dives into the realities behind AI Overviews, the future of affiliate-heavy sites, why schema markup and proprietary research are becoming more valuable, and how brands should think about visibility when traffic might decline but revenue continues to grow.
If you're an SEO, CMO, or digital marketer trying to navigate the AI transformation of search, this episode provides a clear, data-backed roadmap.
🔍 In This Episode
• Why AI referral traffic is only ~1% today and why that number surprises many marketers
• The difference between traditional SEO metrics vs AI search visibility signals
• How brand sentiment, citations, and authority influence LLM results
• Why affiliate-heavy sites are struggling in Google but thriving in LLMs
• The industries triggering the most Google AI Overviews (healthcare & finance)
• How CMOs are reallocating paid search budgets into AI initiatives
• The role of schema markup and proprietary research in future search visibility
• Why AI-generated content without human insight is getting crushed in rankings
• The real reason direct traffic is increasing as people research with AI first
• Predictions for AI search growth, e-commerce agents, and the future of traffic
This episode reveals how search is fragmenting—and why smart marketers must optimize for both traditional search and AI discovery channels.
👍 Subscribe for more deep-dive conversations on SEO, AI search, and digital growth.
💬 Comment below: Do you think AI search will eventually replace Google traffic—or will traditional SEO remain dominant?
Links and Resources Mentioned
• Pat Reinhart on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickreinhart/
• 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmark Report - https://www.conductor.com/academy/aeo-geo-benchmarks-report/
• The State of AEO / GEO in 2026: The CMO Benchmark Report - https://www.conductor.com/academy/state-of-aeo-geo-report/
• Conductor Platform - https://www.conductor.com
Jon Clark (00:00)
Welcome to the Page 2 Podcast where we uncover the strategies, systems, and tactical decisions that move brands beyond Page Two and into real visibility across search and answer engines. Search isn't dying, it's fragmenting, and most companies are measuring the wrong half. Today's guest is Patrick Reinhart, the vice president of services and thought leadership at Conductor, and he's been in the SEO trenches for more than two decades.
Conductor just analyzed millions of prompts and billions of sessions to publish one of the largest AEO and GEO benchmark reports in the industry. The headline? AI referral traffic is about 1%, not 20, not 50, one. And yet budgets are shifting, executives are nervous, and entire teams are reorganizing around a channel that barely shows up in analytics. So what's really happening? Patrick makes the case that AI search isn't a traffic play, at least not yet.
And it's about visibility, citations, brand sentiment, and authority. We talk about why affiliate heavy sites are getting squeezed in traditional search while thriving in LLMs, why healthcare and finance are triggering AI overviews at surprising rates, why Reddit is powerful but risky, and why schema markup and proprietary research may matter more than ever. CMOs are reallocating paid budgets into AI initiatives, and SEO teams are being asked to prove ROI in a world where traffic might decline
while revenue holds steady or even grows. Patrick's advice is simple, but not easy. Nurture both worlds. Traditional search and AI search are converging, but they are not the same thing. Ignore either one at your own risk. I've personally watched this shift play out in client conversations over the last year. The anxiety, the hype, the budget reshuffling. And this conversation helped clarify what signals and what's noise with grounded data. If you learned something new today, take a second to subscribe to the Page 2 Podcast, leave us a rating or review,
and let us know it resonated. We'd love to hear your thoughts. All right, let's get into it.
Jon Clark (01:55)
Welcome to episode 110 of the Page 2 Podcast. I'm your host, Jon Clark, and I'm joined as always by my partner at Moving Traffic Media, Joe DeVita. Today we're joined by a longtime veteran in the SEO space and currently leading Conductor's Customer Success Team as VP of Services and Thought Leadership. Pat Reinhardt, great to have you on.
Joe (02:03)
Hello.
Patrick (02:14)
Yeah, hey guys, thanks for having me on. Great to be here.
Jon Clark (02:17)
So I have some personal history with Conductor going all the way back to 2012. So when I was at Razorfish, we were fighting hard to move Citi and Luke Cohen. So I know he's a huge advocate of Conductor. ⁓ Yep, yep. So we were sort of fighting with Bright Edge to move Citi over to Conductor. So maybe we can talk about war stories on another episode. But that win led to
Patrick (02:21)
Okay.
No, Know Luke very well. Know Luke Lou, very well.
Jon Clark (02:40)
a panel at Conductor's annual C3 conference, which I know is a great conference for all to attend. And most recently was actually in your offices back in July for a panel around just how this ecosystem is evolving with everything AI. But I thought maybe to set the stage for the discussion around AEO, geo, and some of the things that you guys were finding in the benchmarks report, Conductor has come a long way since
2012, right? You guys just took the top spot in Forrester's wave report on SEO and AEO technology. So anyone who's ever taken part in one of those reports knows what a lift that is. And then you followed that up with the number one ranking in software reviews, annual technology data quadrant, which is a mouthful. it's really been fun to just have a front row seat in evolution of the product and guys are spearheading the evolution of what we're seeing here.
Joe (03:28)
I think the evolution is like forever for you guys. I read an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Your boss, Seth, did an interview. I don't know if you read it yet. It just came out yesterday. I've got a few questions I got to ask you because we don't have Seth with us. First of all, the author of the Wall Street Journal article, he calls Conductor a startup. Like you guys are 14 years into this with like hundreds of employees. How does that make you feel?
Patrick (03:28)
Yeah. ⁓
Jon Clark (03:41)
Hehehe
Patrick (03:50)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting, right? Because so here's why a lot of people say that. Because remember, like Conductor was owned by WeWork for 20 months, right? So when we were, you know, like so beforehand, I joined Conductor in 2015. I was a, and I was a customer before that. So I've known Seth a really long time and part of the Conductor ecosystem a really long time. And, you know, like when we were going in there, we always acted as a startup, you know, even as we were going, you know, 20, 30, $40 million in ARR.
And then the WeWork thing happens, right? So we go through the whirlwind that was WeWork. And there were many great experiences and many strange ones.
Again, for another time, I could do a whole podcast on that. But ultimately what happened was we bought the company back from WeWork and we were kind of a $50 million startup. And I remember that was talked about a little bit in the media and I think people held on to that. But certainly these days, Conductor is not a startup, right? Is there a startup feel and environment if you come into the office? Absolutely. But we are certainly not a startup these days.
Jon Clark (04:42)
Mm.
Joe (04:57)
Well, one of the things I learned from that article yesterday was that you guys are starting to interview for AI literacy. They're like some of the things you guys are doing to push your team to get more comfortable using AI. It was the first time I ever read about it from a tech company perspective. So if you're comfortable talking a little bit about that, just a couple of questions. Like how do you interview for AI literacy?
Patrick (05:20)
Yeah, you know, and it's a great question. appreciate Seth's passion about this because he's right. I was like, perfect I actually, I do phone, like people reach out to me on LinkedIn all the time, especially students. Students reach out to me all the time. So I spoke to this very bright young woman from USC the other day. And she was asking me, how do I get into this field?
And the first thing I told her, was like, do you use AI? She goes here and there. I go, the best thing that you can do to stand out is to really become literate in AI. And the way to do that is go out, build an learn how to write prompts, go build a website and see if you can, there are tools out there that will give you a free shot of how you're doing in AI and organic. And that is the great way to do it. Now, Joe, to answer your question, how do you actually test for that?
You come in, you give them a task and you ask them to build an agent with a prompt and see if it can complete the task. Right? Like, like it's very simple actually to see if someone knows what they're talking about. It's the same thing. Like, listen, I've been in SEO for like 23 years, right? Like you can like, and I don't, I don't lay traps for people in interviews. Cause I know there are people that like you're, trying to really kick the tires, but you can tell when someone knows what they're talking about versus when someone who doesn't know when they're talking about pretty easily. And I feel, and I agree with Seth. I think that this is going to be
the same as like when going to college was a prerequisite to getting any corporate job, of course is not true these days, still very important. But ultimately, I think AI literacy is going to be the same as like, I know how to use Word and Excel and PowerPoint back when I was looking for a job back in the early 2000s.
Joe (06:53)
So last about that article, then we can move on to the more important stuff. So once you've hired these people, you've got everyone pushing everyone to get AI more and more into their workflows. And you even Conductor has come up with a reward system for those who make the most improvements using AI in their workflow. And the contest is like a free vacation. Did I read that right? You guys are sending people on a vacation?
Patrick (07:18)
So
that's what Seth wants to do. Right now, right now it's an award at the end of the year that everyone, you know, like, so like actually an individual on my team who I'm super proud of his name's Ralph. You know, he went from, you know, he's a huge AI enthusiast, right? Like he's been in the SEO space for a really long time, like me. He's one of my best friends. And he like built an entire platform, just vibe coding, right? He's not a software engineer. And so he won the runner up.
Joe (07:21)
⁓ okay, alright.
Jon Clark (07:22)
Ha
Patrick (07:47)
And then one of the engineers won the winner of the AI Innovation Award, which was a new award that we started this year. But Seth really wants to reward people with that. And yes, he has mentioned that along the way, that people who really do great. He will do it. He will do it. Seth, if anything, he is a man of his word. He says, hey, I'm going to take the Farrest Away report, for example, right? ⁓
So hats off to our marketing team. I've participated in one of those where I was actually in it. What a really tough, tough process to go through. And Seth said at beginning, goes, if we win this thing, I'm going to take you all to Vegas. And they held him to it. And they all went to Vegas. And he did. And to his word, he took them all to Vegas for a He loves rewarding people who get excited about what they're doing. And this AI thing is exciting, especially for people like me who have been doing SEO for a long time.
Jon Clark (08:17)
Tough. Super tough.
Joe (08:25)
Yeah.
Patrick (08:37)
It's exciting, you know, this is like a whole new, I feel like my whole career has started over in a very good way.
Jon Clark (08:42)
Yeah, this comes up a lot on the pod. SEO was sort of stagnant for a few years, right? It was just sort of doing a lot of the same things. And now there's like this whole, yeah, you're right, excitement with everything that's changing so quickly. So maybe that's a good segue into the report. So you guys launched an AEO GEO slash benchmark report. And I think this is the first time Conductor's really established industry benchmarks
Patrick (08:47)
yeah.
Jon Clark (09:07)
at least within that segment, right? Is that true? Okay.
Patrick (09:09)
Yeah.
That's true. Yeah. And this
study was massive. It's one of the biggest studies we ever did, right? It was analyzing millions of prompts. You know, I think it was like three and a half million prompts, 3.3 billion sessions to really see where things were coming from. Because one of the problems, not problems, that's the wrong word. One of the challenges, you know, when anything new comes out is all of a sudden all these studies start flying in, right? And they're like, hey, here's what's going on. Well, what was this based on? It was based on 12,000 prompts. It's like
Well, that's statistically irrelevant. You know, like, so it's like, still a good, like the math is good and I get the methodology, but the data, we needed to collect enough data to actually make this thing, you know, like worthwhile to put out into the ecosystem. And again, hats off to our marketing team. They did a really good job with this and the insights have been, it's really fascinating to see how fast things are changing, but also,
the hype, right? Like everything's coming from AI. Everyone's going to AI. That's not really true, is it? Right? Like, yes, yes, many people use AI. That's 100 % true. And most of the world's population has not used AI yet. I saw another study on that yesterday. But ultimately, people still Google things, right? A lot of people have an AI-influenced experience. They're not solely on an AI experience.
Jon Clark (10:20)
Right. I was curious about the framework that you guys used from the domain analysis. So if I remember correctly, you looked at almost, I think it was 14,000 different domains, but most of those were mapped to the GICS industry framework, which I think is like more financial, right? Is there a reason that you sort of focused in on that segment? So for example, one of the notable industries not included was like e-commerce, right?
Patrick (10:35)
Yep.
Jon Clark (10:44)
So I think some of the takeaways are very specific to financial related industries. Is there a reason that that framework was the priority there?
Patrick (10:53)
So the reason that that was used, because it's the most globally accepted way to look at industries on a fair basis. So e-commerce would fall into consumer discretionary, for example. That's where that would fall. And we got that question a lot, by the way. Where's retail? Where's ⁓ e-commerce? Etcetera, etcetera. Can we dig down deeper into that? And we're going to take that back as feedback for the next one. We'll probably break it out a little bit further. But for this first big one, especially in this industry,
Jon Clark (11:04)
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Patrick (11:22)
we were going back and forth and our head of marketing just just go with the globally accepted way to look at industries across the world and across then we'll go with that for the first one. We'll get feedback and then we'll put that into the next iteration of it. But that's really the reason that we did that, because it's just a globally accepted way to look at industries on a fair basis.
Jon Clark (11:43)
Makes sense, makes sense. I was also curious any blind spots or maybe biases in the data that would want to call out as people are evaluating this data. Anything that you guys identified that be an asterisk to some of the output.
Patrick (12:00)
Not really, honestly. This was all the data from, like, so listen, three and a half years ago when our new, I keep calling her our new Chief Product Officer, she's been here a long time, when our Chief Product Officer, Zhang, came You know, she pushed us to rebuild our entire data platform so that we could actually do studies like this and also so that our product could meet the needs of today, right? A really big bet that Seth left placed and it worked out.
you're like honestly like this this data is all clean. It's all like there's nothing biased about it. There's nothing Conductor-esque about it. This is conductors customers data that is in our platform That is anonymized of course, you know and just put into these different industries. But like, we don't like we don't really influence a lot of what many of our customers do. Yes, we help them set their their like the product up at the beginning of the relationship,
but ultimately, all we're doing is matching it to their website structure. And so there's really no bias towards Conductor or towards one industry or the next. We have almost 800 customers across all these different industries, and it's pretty evenly spread.
Jon Clark (13:05)
Got it, got it. I think the headline number was that 1%, or I think it was like 1.08 % of web traffic that was coming from AI referral sources.
Patrick (13:09)
1.08 percent ⁓
Jon Clark (13:16)
I guess a couple of questions here. One is we know that referral traffic, especially in the early days, was tough to track. For example, ChatGPT wasn't properly tagging things. Could that number have been a little bit higher, do you think, because of those tracking issues? Or would it have been sort of a nominal percentage? The takeaway is, hey, traffic is not high right now. So it's something to be anticipating growth, but not necessarily a doomsday scenario.
Patrick (13:41)
Yeah,
it would be a fractional difference, honestly, you know, and because like, listen, you're like, as I've learned more and more about this, done more experiments with customers, you know, like really gotten my like, if you'd asked me this, a year and a half ago, I'd probably be like, yeah, you know, I don't really know. I'm pretty confident it would be a fractional difference because
the traditional search aspect of it versus the AI search, people are mixing these two things together as they should be tracked the same, and they're just fundamentally different. Yes, you do many of the similar tactics across the two, but when you think about what you're actually trying to accomplish in traditional search, what's it about? It's about keyword rankings, it's about traffic, it's about clicks, impressions, domain authority, blah, blah, right? All of that stuff. AI search, I am convinced, is about visibility
across the LLMs, citations, brand mentions, definitely, and is social listening. It is what is the vibe of your brand. I have talked more about brand sentiment, is something that we're actually enhancing in the product. Like tomorrow, we're releasing the new version our AI interface tomorrow on February 27. And ultimately,
Like what I've found is that when I talk to customers, they're really interested in this very small piece of it, which is brand sentiment, right? And they're like, wow, like what are people saying about my brand in AI? That's what people care about. It's so much more about brand authority, like social awareness and yes, overall visibility, but it's not really a traffic play. And that 1 % didn't surprise me at all. It's exactly what I thought it was gonna be. It's exactly what other studies had said. So I think we're all just kind of confirming with each other that AI really isn't a traffic play.
I don't think you're going to see a significant amount of traffic from AI until the e-commerce economy booms, like the agentic e-commerce booms, because then there's going to be cards showing up. People are going to look at a product. They're going to want to know more. And they're going to click into the website from there. And I think that's when you're going to start to see referral traffic, like significant referral traffic coming from LLMs, which will still be fractional to Google, in my opinion, for the foreseeable future.
Joe (15:42)
I just, I have a question about who you've got. You guys have 800 companies, huge companies using your platform. Maybe you don't know this yet, but a new investment has to happen to optimize for an LLM. It, unless you're going to give up investment somewhere else, but there's a social team that has a budget that has a stake in this. And there's a brand management team that has a stake in this. Will other people's, will, will budgets flow into this?
will come out of SEO? Are you starting to get a sense of how the teams come together and where the money comes from?
Patrick (16:15)
Yep, great question. In my experience right now, and that actually speaks to the other report that we did with all the CMOs, like they are all increasing their budget from,
typically paid search is where a lot of the budget's coming from right now. They're not taking it away from smaller teams because paid budgets at these companies are ludicrously high. So they can say, hey, listen, I'm going to take 50 grand from here a year and put it over here and buy a software. That's not a huge, but that's mainly where it's coming from today. Now to answer the second part of your question, like how are the teams coming together? This is kind of rush aspect of this, right?
Spoken to more C-level executives in the last six months than I have in the last 10 years in speaking about organic. I was on the phone with the CMO of MasterCard a few months ago, lovely human being, and we had a great conversation, but I was nervous because I was like, wow. I was like, you know, like,
this person at this humongous company really cares about this. And I knew it was a thing when my brother called me. So my brother's a C level executive as well. He works at a bank and he calls me he goes, Hey, what's up with this AI thing? And this was like a year ago. Why are you calling me about this? He goes, it's in the journal. I was like the Wall Street Journal? And he goes, Yeah, I go, this is how you know this is a thing. And this is why executives are really thinking about because it's being talked about in the Wall Street Journal. It's impacting, it's on the news. Everybody's talking about it.
And so that investment is typically coming from paid search or it's just strictly new investment that they're making. They're saying, hey, listen, we need to create a separate line item for this. And our report even shows that increase, you know, like there and next year it's going to be bigger. And I think the next year it's going to be even bigger because AI is going to be the number one seller for companies, right? It's going to be your number one salesperson is AI because people are going to go there and they're going to understand, they're going to want to know who is this brand? What are they about?
And I believe that they will still go to your website, even though there are some people think the website stays are numbered. I don't believe that. We can again, and the whole another podcast on that. But ultimately, you know what I mean? Like AI is the vibe of your brand. And that's why so many people want to know how do people perceive me in AI because that's where everyone's going. And ultimately, yeah, pretty much, you know, everyone's going to be using this at some point in the future. And you want your brand to be talked about and be seen in a positive light.
And that's why, and Seth always says this, AI's gonna be your number one salesperson, and I 100 % agree with him.
Jon Clark (18:34)
I was really curious about like the, this is probably an impossible question, but is there like a dollar amount that you can apply to this? Cause one of the things in the CMO report that was so fascinating to me was that so many companies responded with like, yes, we're investing here or we're significantly investing. Like what does that mean from a dollar amount? Like, is there a number, like a range that that makes up or is it
more of just a survey question and that budget could be all over the map?
Patrick (19:03)
The budget, it's significant. When you think about it being zero, I would say the average range is probably between $50,000 to $250,000 that's being invested in this right now. definitely some that are in the higher end of that. There's definitely some there on the lower end of that, but that's probably the median of where everyone's falling because people are buying technologies. And again, think about all the technologies that have just spun up. Like here, you got...
Jon Clark (19:18)
Right.
Sure, okay.
Patrick (19:29)
You got a bunch of us going out, you know, like we rebuilt our entire platform over the last three and a half years to meet this need that we thought was coming. And thankfully it did. But like when you think about that, people they don't know what they don't know. And then there's a lot of people that are also panic buying right now. They're like, we just need something, right? And they might buy something that has crappy data and they don't know it has crappy data, but at least it gives them a graph
that they can show their boss and says, hey, here's where we're at. Here's what we want to do. What you're going to see here is that there's going to be a lot of companies that come and go just like there were in the SEO world. Because and you're seeing massive consolidation in SEO right now, right? Think about Adobe just bought SEMrush. You know, like we acquired Content King, now Conductor website monitoring, BrightEdge acquired Oncroll. You're seeing a lot of these point solutions starting to really be swallowed up by the bigger companies.
And that's what's going to happen in the AI, like the AEO space, right? Is that, you you have like, there's like 36 or 37 startups, you know, that recently received funding, like over the past 18 months, some more prominent than others, you know, two of them have already closed, you'll probably see the majority of them, you know, close once they figure out how expensive this is to actually build and run. And then you're going to have the people that go to the cheaper folks, then they look under the hood for a year.
And they're like, Oh man, this data isn't really good. This is like panel data. Like this isn't like data. Like, for example, like Conductor, like we hook up to the OpenAI's API, right? Like we get it directly from OpenAI. But most others scrape ChatGPT. And that's very low fidelity data. And people are starting to figure that out. And then you're going to start to see the churn, right? They're going to go out. They're going to look at us. They'll look at BrightEdge. They'll look at Clarity. They'll look at everyone that's doing something AI. And then a couple of them will survive. And again, we want
them to survive. We want them to thrive because that's good for all of us. That's a good environment, right? Competition is healthy and that makes all the companies more valuable. So I want the Profounds of the world and the AirOps of the world to be successful, right? Like I wish them well, you know, because that's good for everyone. That's good for the space. But it's going to be interesting because it's moving so quickly.
And there's so many companies right now that are selling a lot of stuff. I know that isn't necessarily true. But again, a lot of people don't know because there's not a lot of education out there, which is a lot of what my job is, is to help people understand what's good, what's bad, what's the right way to think about things, at least how we understand them today versus, and sometimes Conductor's not the right technology for you. That's totally fine. There's nothing wrong with But ultimately, there are a lot of people out there that are like,
just like in the SEO industry, they're selling the purest form of snake oil now because it's the wild, it's not even the Wild West, it is the wild Wild West right now. No, no.
Jon Clark (22:01)
You
Right. Right.
Joe (22:06)
Yeah, no black hat yet. I want to make
I wonder if I could ask you to make a distinction on the executive investment. It seems like it's all technology right now. If you're going to invest up to a quarter million dollars in 2026, it's largely for one or two platforms to help your team get stronger at this optimist at this new with this new channel. You're not hiring. There isn't a huge
cohort of people they can hire to do this work. So they're not hiring new people. They're asking their existing team to retool a little bit. You're seeing the same I don't want to put the answer in your mouth, but who is this team that's being asked to retool and figure this out?
Patrick (22:36)
Yep.
Yep, no, it's pretty much what we're seeing across the board, right? a lot of people think about Conductor, they're like, Oh, we only work with SEO teams. That is not true. Most of the people that are in Conductor, the lion's share are content We work with a lot of content teams, a lot of technical teams, a lot of just general digital teams. SEO is a cohort and a very important cohort to us. Don't get me wrong. But we're vastly more in with content, digital teams, and technical teams, just due to how many products we have.
So when we go, like something that was surprising to me was like, you you go into a huge company and you're like, so, okay, you have like one or two people that are not traditional SEO or search people, you know, maybe they're, you know, they're typically content people or digital, like generalists that are running this. What do you want us to do? It's like, I want you to upskill my people. And then once I can see what my existing team can do, then I'll consider hiring somebody. And that's what happens.
A lot of what I do or help companies do is build these programs, you know, within their organization, enable people across a year, 18 months. And then they get to a point where they're like, okay, we're pretty self-sufficient right now, but now someone needs to steer the ship. Conductor, like my team, the professional services team, it was the person steering that ship for the first year, right? But I don't want to work with you forever. You should be able to do this yourself. Like that's, I'm the weirdest service guy on the planet because I start my pitch with, I don't want to work with you in two years because I want you to do this yourself.
Jon Clark (24:05)
You
Patrick (24:06)
You know, because that's the right way to do it. And that's when they go and they say, maybe I should hire someone or maybe or what I've seen happen also Joe, is that some person that we've been working with enjoys it so much that they'll raise their hand and they'll take on the responsibility and they move an internal resource into that role. And it's a tremendous opportunity for SEO professionals. You know, and this is going to open up a whole new job market because it's a, you know, it's a unique skill set.
You know, we're uniquely set up to handle all this and to understand all of it. But that's what I'm seeing right now. A lot of people, they want to upskill their internal teams first and see where they're at. And then they hand it off to someone. And maybe there is a search person there, but they usually need help in getting the whole thing up and running.
Jon Clark (24:50)
But that definitely tracks with how we were using Conductor Razorfish. A lot of it was around content teams looking for content decay, all that sort of stuff, which is maybe a good segue into the, the survey question around impact of these AEO, GEO efforts. And one of the things that was sort of striking to me was that, I think it was over 70 % of
Patrick (24:55)
Yep. Yep.
Jon Clark (25:12)
respondents said that the impact was significant or that it was advanced or very advanced. And I thought that was really interesting I'm always like, well, how can it be advanced given that it's such a new thing? You know what I mean? But the, the challenges remained relatively, don't know, basics, the wrong word, but it was like, you know, how to create optimized a AEO like content, which seems like
on the end of advanced. I'm just curious about like, is there like a maturity gap between what people think is advanced versus what folks are actually doing? Is that why that sort of nuance is there?
Patrick (25:49)
I think so, right? I think that's, I think this is an education and understanding thing, right? Like I think they feel it's a huge impact. It's because it's all anyone is talking about, right? It's like, Hey, like we, we are having a huge impact because we brought this, you we brought this team in and we're doing a lot of activities and we feel that our visibility has increased and we have a tool that tells us our visibility has increased. And if that's the case, good for them. Then maybe he has had a big impact, but I don't think anyone
Jon Clark (25:58)
Mm.
Patrick (26:17)
like, no one is an AEO expert yet. You know what I mean? Like, you know, like no one is like, I have all these people who tell me it's like, well, I'm an AEO expert. go, really? I was just like, you're an AEO expert. This has existed for like 24 months. I was just like, that's crazy. Cause it took me like 10 years to become an SEO expert before I was even comfortable saying that. I was like, wow, I was like, you know, cause I would never tell someone I'm an AEO expert, right? Like I'm a search expert, but like I am learning about this with everyone else. But I think that that's like,
Jon Clark (26:20)
Right, right.
Right.
R.I.P.
Patrick (26:45)
I love the confidence that they feel that something great's going on. You know, that's awesome. But I also believe that it's probably a, you know, just like an understanding educational thing that might be, you know what mean? That might be a little bit, you know.
Jon Clark (26:57)
Yep, yep.
the other thing that I was really interesting was Eli Schwartz contributed to the CMO report and he predicted something to the effect of there's going to be some sort of update that slaps maybe, you know, low value, AI content. And I think we actually just saw the first instance of that with the latest algorithm update, right? Where these listicles sort of self-serving listicles are basically getting crushed. Do you foresee more of that coming?
Is that sort of the first instance of what we could potentially expect with future algorithm updates around that?
Patrick (27:28)
Absolutely. We're only going to see things getting slapped down more and more and more. Again, the listicle thing is actually a perfect example. It's like everyone that was in search has amnesia. It's like everyone talking about creating a markdown file for their site right now. It's like that's not necessary yet. It might not ever be necessary. Maybe when the web MCP thing goes out that Google and Bing have been talking about. But that's not an accepted protocol yet.
Jon Clark (27:41)
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Patrick (27:56)
And like this is this is just amnesia like people forgetting that like if you do that that is cloaking you're just literally making another version of your site. It's this form of cloaking like you're going to get hit down. Lily Ray was talking about this for like a year. She's like this listicle thing. This is this is going to get nerfed and for lack of better words and it got nerfed in the last one right. And this is like again like an every single person or site, not person,
and every single site that I see that is just dumping AI content onto their site without it actually having a human in the loop or any sort of unique POV or anything like that, all of those sites are tanking right now. They are all tanking right now. And that is because AI is going to move infinitely quicker than Google's algorithm did throughout the 2000s,
right? Because like, you like you, were able to get away with a lot of stuff for a very long time, right? And it took him to like, really like the, like when Panda and Penguin came out, like those updates, that's when Google really, really started to police the algorithm, right? AI moves lightning quick, right? Like it's fine. It's going to find all of this stuff.
Jon Clark (28:47)
Right. Right.
Patrick (29:01)
And it's going to knock it down very quickly. So we're only going to see more of this. And you're even seeing it with Google right now from a scraping standpoint, collecting ranking data has become incredibly more difficult past the first 20 results. That's because Google is actually starting to sue vendors that are scraping them at large and then selling their data. This is what's happening right now. Google is going to stop people from doing this. AI is going to help understand when people are doing shady things
a lot quicker and we're only going to see more of it. It's going to be more intense, but it will be better for the web in my opinion, because only the people who earn it, which is what we've all been trying to get to all these years, right? Really only that like AI will make that possible. Not, not now, but like, you know, three, four years from now, I believe that people who like earn it will be the ones that actually show up in all this because AI is going to be so good at picking up when people are doing garbage tactics.
Jon Clark (29:58)
Yeah. I think, I think one thing, about the data or the analysis itself that sort of speaks a little bit to that is the NerdWallet They produce a lot of excellent content getting crushed from, an AIO perspective, but within, LLMs they're it's curious about your thoughts there. Like, what do you.
Patrick (30:08)
Great content.
Doing
Jon Clark (30:17)
Maybe to back up. So I think one of the things that a lot of clients that we're talking to about is expanding content, being more descriptive, adding FAQs, right? And an effort to compete better in the LLM side of things. Do you predict that some of these competitors that have the brand, like a Chase Bank, for example, do you think they'll be able to compete better
through those types of tactics? or is this something that the LLMs are just gonna naturally catch up as it relates to like brand entities?
Patrick (30:46)
Yeah, I think, you know, like, NerdWallet it's like a contradiction, right, of what you typically see, right? You do well in organic, like in traditional organic, you typically do well in, you know, in LLMs, right, in AI search. So they're a little bit of a contradiction. And again, like their team creates great content, their site's a great site. But like something that I've been saying for over two years now, and something that I've noticed in Google, and this is just in Google, I think this is a Google thing versus an LLM thing. Google,
is clearly, clearly looking to the actual organization or hospital system or financial institution versus these content hubs or content sites. And it doesn't mean that those sites are not well maintained like them, Bankrate, all that, NerdWallet, all of them. It just means that I think Google, if you ask them, hey, I want to compare a credit card, either A,
Google just wants to do the comparison on the SERP, like right on the SERP themselves. Or B, they want to send you to the actual financial institution that gives you the card. They don't necessarily want to send you to an affiliate site, which is largely what those sites are. They're affiliate sites, right? And I think that that's a crackdown on the affiliate model, which they have been doing more and more over the years. Now, in LLMs, LLMs care about authority,
Jon Clark (31:51)
Sure.
Patrick (32:02)
right? Like they want to know that, you know, I always say like, from what I have experienced and what I see in the data is that LLMs care about real people having real conversations about your brand. Like they're looking all over the internet, Reddit, Quora, whatever. They want to know that your brand is real. They want to know that people there know what they're talking about. And it doesn't surprise me that something like NerdWallet does well there because they have all of the experts
writing that content. All their content is from like financial analysts and you know, real people that write it, which is why it's surprising, you know, that Google doesn't like them. And I think this is a Google thing that they would, they are promoting. see it in WebMD. WebMD, you look at their, their performance over years, like Healthline, like all of that, all of those big sites are like down by like 50, 60 % year over year, like from a, from like a top 10 visibility standpoint and just overall.
Jon Clark (32:29)
Right.
Patrick (32:52)
And I think that's because Google favors the actual institution, whereas LLMs are still, really about authority. And NerdWallet deserves authority because they have people there who work in the industry that are writing these great articles. I think it's just Google looks at it differently these days. That's just what my guts been telling me over the last couple of years. But to answer your question about someone like Chase Bank, they're going to do good in both because, again, they're the brand. LLMs love the brand.
And Google loves the brand. Google's always loved the brand. But I think LLMs, there's a lot, it's a lot more even playing field on the LLM right now, where a much smaller, like if you're looking at like payment processing, Like Stripe can very much go up against American Express right now. Like PayPal can very much go up against MasterCard. Like no problem, they'll all show up there. But again, in Google, that has been a shift over the last two years that I've been tracking, actually on my webinar
30- 30, you know, like I talk about it like often I'm like, hey, we've been and actually the audience actually told me to stop like talking about every week because I was coming real obsessed with it. I was like, all right, all right, I'll do it every like three months, you know, and so I still bring it up and everyone's like, my God, come on, you know, but it's like it's this thing that I truly believe is is what's happening.
Jon Clark (33:53)
Yeah
Joe (34:04)
Every three on the 30-30, that's the new...
Patrick (34:06)
Yeah, like every time I'm just like, every
time I bring it go, and I always brace everyone, I'm gonna talk about NerdWallet and WebMD for a minute.
Jon Clark (34:15)
Hahaha
Joe (34:16)
Can
Can I ask you to make a distinction maybe or just clarify that point? The other big winner that came from that benchmarks report was Zillow. So completely different industry. We're talking about real estate now, but I mean, they're not, that's not an affiliate type of business. Zillow announced that partnership with ChatGPT back in October. And I think the timeframe of the benchmarks report starts around October.
Patrick (34:39)
Yep,
Right around there,
Joe (34:40)
I wonder,
I don't know if you thought about this at all, but was that like there's a Zillow app within ChatGPT and I wonder if there was a boost Zillow got from that. Have you thought about that at all?
Patrick (34:51)
Maybe, you know, like, again, like the partnership thing, like, OpenAI does a lot of partnerships, right? Like they, like when, like some of their first ones were like, were with like the Wall Street Journal and you know, like New York Times because they were trying to fight back against like fake news and like trying to create an environment where publishers can exist online, which I think is very noble, you know, but ultimately I don't necessarily like, did they get a boost for the partnership.
I'm sure they're favored in the model. I'm sure they're favored because they're a source, they're like a true source. Because again, that's really what OpenAI cares about. If we're just talking about ChatGPT, they care about the true source. And it's like if someone is looking for a listing that Zillow has, and they believe that Zillow is the best source for that, whether the partnership or not.
They're gonna show, they're gonna go to Zillow and they're gonna show it. So it wasn't surprising to me to see that. And Joe, probably a little bit, right? It probably has a little bit to do with the partnership. But ultimately, Zillow is where a lot of people go. You know, like they would probably be there. They would probably have those numbers regardless of the partnership or not. But I'm sure that number's a little bit higher because of it.
Jon Clark (35:54)
I was curious about, you know, speaking of real as it relates to AIOs specifically, I think healthcare was around like 50 % of queries were triggering versus, you know, maybe just 4 % for real estate. Do you, and it kind of makes sense, right? The reasoning behind it, but do you anticipate that increasing over time or is it just something that's really difficult for
Patrick (36:02)
Yeah.
Jon Clark (36:15)
I don't know, search engines to get their arms around how to best present that, right? Because it is very visual, picture heavy, a house is a house kind of thing.
Patrick (36:22)
Yeah.
Yeah. And like, isn't that funny though, that the like, you know, like YMYL, like, you know, industries are the highest financial services and healthcare where you think AI, would like, they wouldn't have AI touch with a 10 foot pole. They are the highest by far. Like people ask me about healthcare stuff. It's like, it's so funny to me. But yeah, I mean, I think like, like you said, from a real estate, like if someone's looking for an address,
Jon Clark (36:30)
Great.
You got it. Yeah, healthcare especially.
Patrick (36:43)
what's an AI overview gonna tell them, right? Like just go to the Zillow listing. Like you can't do anything with it. Maybe they could show the picture of the house in the AI overview, I guess. I think that
like healthcare I get a little bit because of the amount of questions that people are asking. Like someone's looking for a house. Say I'm looking for this house and like, know, like I live in Wanto, Long Island. I'm looking for 18 blah, blah, blah in Long Island. They're just going to show you the Zillow listing, you know, like there's going to go here, go to realtor.com, go to MLS, etcetera, etcetera. But like for something people who are asking about like, what is healthcare part A mean? What does that mean? You know, like people are asking those questions, those real informational makes sense to me. It's just a little dangerous because I've seen some really
dangerous like AI overviews for finance, especially in the financial space where, Google has to be careful that they're not accidentally giving like financial advice to people because there's a lot of people it's like, like where like if you ask it, for example, like, where should I get a mortgage, right? Like it may suggest a couple of companies to you. It's like they really they really shouldn't be doing that. You know, it's like it's like they should just say, hey, here's a list of stuff. But like there I've actually seen them before say like, like, you know, here's a top rated company that you may want to look into. It's like that's a that's a recommendation.
And if something happens there, someone could go back to be like, well, Google told me to use you. It's like, uh-oh. Then that's a whole other thing. But that's why it's funny to me that those two sectors, I understand because there's so many questions in there that people can ask. But mean, that's true of really anything. And naturally, where AI overviews are going to show up like 80 % of the time one day, right? Because even in the last update, in our data, they went from like 25 % for months. It was like they were showing up for 25%, then the December update hit
45 % and then it went like that and then the next one it's gonna be 65 % and it's all informational queries, right? And that's why that's why when people are freaking out about their traffic going away, I always tell them like it's your blog traffic though, cuz like you still need the content to be there, you're just not getting the visits anymore, though. How's your bottom line?
Oh, we're fine. We're making more money than we did last year ago, so why do you care? It's like, you know, keep making the content so LLMs get it. People will find you and buy something eventually. I was like, people are like the obsession with traffic, you know, that's a whole again, a whole other podcast that I go, I could go down.
Jon Clark (38:51)
Well, I think in some ways we maybe incorrectly trained the industry that traffic was the good thing because it was easier, quote unquote, to generate versus revenue. ⁓
Patrick (38:56)
We did. Easy. Yeah.
Yeah,
Absolutely. And everyone's goals are attached to it, right? It's just like, hey, what's your goal this year? It's like, goal to raise traffic 10%. It's like, well, traffic's down 30 % across the board. like, yeah.
Jon Clark (39:06)
Right, exactly.
Well, maybe so there was a prediction that referral traffic I think would be capped around like 20 % from LLMs into 2026 on data that you're looking at. know, is that, is that an over or an under at this point so far? I know we're only two months in, but.
Patrick (39:28)
I hope
It's an over. Yeah. I don't think we're going to get there. So every December I do a predictions thing as well. And I said, last year I'd said LLMs are going to be the talk of the town, but there's going to be no traffic. And that's exactly what happened. This year I said, I think it might get to 10%. Might get to 10%. And that's only because of the e-commerce economy that might boom,
that would send more traffic to your site, that might be where you get your 20%. And like, you know, that might be, holy crap, like you're like that, that's where this all starts. But if, but that really hasn't started yet, you know what I mean? Like, like you said, we're already two months into the year and that that's really just getting those, those gears are just grinding now. And will it be swift? Yes, of course it will be once people can get their, their feeds in their product feeds into open AI and however that works, you know, like they're definitely going to do it like immediately, but
I think it'll get to like 10 % and I think it might cap out there for a while. But again, the only wild card or unknown for me is how much people are gonna, how many people are gonna click on those cards that show up in the e-commerce, like in the e-commerce conversation with the LLMs and say like, well, I wanna see like a bigger picture of this and then go to the actual website. And that becomes where like a lot of LLM traffic comes from.
Jon Clark (40:45)
Got it, got it. I did want to quickly talk about some So I really liked the way AI traffic was positioned as sort of a lagging signal, the visibility piece, the citations, the mentions, share voice, etcetera, is kind of that primary objective that you should be focused on. And I feel like Conductor is really focused on positioning themselves there, right? Is that fair to say or
is the traffic analysis piece still a core component of what you guys are doing?
Patrick (41:12)
No, yeah, I would say that it's a little bit of both. We'll show you traffic versus, but I think it's like, the way we show it is traffic versus your organic traffic. It's all in one chart. So you can say, listen, just look at the comparison between the two, because the two of these things kind of dance in the same circles. But in the same breath, traffic is absolutely a lagging indicator, because you can see it in people's behavior. What do people do? They go to ChatGPT to do work for them.
I always use this story of like, my wife and I was our 15 year wedding anniversary this past year, right? She said, we went to New Orleans. She goes, you pick the restaurants. I was like, ugh. I was like, okay. So I'm an avid Gemini user today, but I was using ChatGPT at the time. This is last October. And so I went, hey ChatGPT, I was like, give me like, you know, the 10 best rated and reviewed restaurants in New Orleans around the French quarter, right? That's the work it did for me. Cause I don't want to go out and find stuff and you know, do the legwork for me.
Jon Clark (42:05)
Mm-hmm.
Patrick (42:07)
And then I also asked it and give me their websites. Because then I came back and then I went to all their websites. I looked at the vibe of the restaurant, I looked at the menus. Would we like this? Would this be cool? Yada, yada. And then what did I do? I Googled their restaurant name and then I went to their website through Google. Or I went directly to the website if I could find it, right? That is what everybody is doing right now. And that's why a lot of sites are seeing an increase in direct traffic because people are using the LLM as a research tool, which is really what it is.
And then, you know, and they're doing like all the legwork, all the collecting and all that, blah, blah. And then they're like, okay, now I want to go see this brand. To me, I was like, now I want to go see what this restaurant looks like, which I'm not going to see in the chat interface. And that's really what's happening right now. So for, for me, like traffic comes way later, you know, like people use chat, like chat, and then they come back way later, either hours or days later to your website and find you after they have already
found out about your window shopped you ChatGPT because I mean that's what happened like like Google you know that was the only place to window shop at that scale right now you have all these other you have all these other LLM interfaces you can just window shop there and then eventually let's face it you know people don't you know you don't search things you Google things people will continue to go to Google and we're even seeing Gemini start to really take away a lot of market share from ChatGPT
Jon Clark (43:12)
Right.
.
Patrick (43:30)
like over the last three months, they took 21 % market share away from ChatGPT in the last three months. Like Google, like next year, let's say I come back next year and we're chatting about it, I will guarantee you that Gemini will be more highly used than ChatGPT.
Jon Clark (43:33)
Wow.
Joe (43:44)
We would love to have you on next year. Are you going to do this benchmark report every six months? What are the thoughts on the next one?
Patrick (43:46)
Yeah.
My guess is that they'll do it at least annually. Given how fast everything is moving, I wouldn't be surprised if it was every six months. I don't know the plans for it yet. I'd have to ask head of marketing. And I also don't want to promise something or else she'll kill me. But I would imagine it would probably be every six months, but at least annually.
Jon Clark (44:04)
you
Got it, got A couple of rapid fire questions to round things up. So for this one, I'll give you a format and you tell me if it's overrated, underrated, or exactly where it should be for AEO in 2026. ⁓ The first one is schema markup. I know there's been a whole bunch of debater on this, but.
Patrick (44:22)
Okay.
Underrated. I think there are people that and I get it and I get I know people listening like it's like there are so many sites out there that have broken schema have missing schema that they don't understand the benefits that will come today but not but even the benefits that will come tomorrow like when eight like when all these different types of agents are coming to your site and looking at things schema markup is extremely important and I think people know it's important
but I still think a lot of people don't pay enough attention to it.
Jon Clark (44:56)
Totally with you on that one. All right, the next one, original proprietary research.
Patrick (45:00)
That is underrated as well. A lot of people are throwing just AI slop onto their sites, right? Like they don't understand what a good prompt is, you know, they don't understand, you know, like what a good article looks like, and they don't realize that the most important asset that a company has is its wisdom, right? Like you need like a unique POV, imbue your wisdom into your content. That's how you stand out. Anyone can go to, I can go to ChatGPT to be right? Write me an article about running shoes, right?
Everyone can do that. How do you stand out? Even if you're a really good prompt engineer, how do you go from a B plus piece of content to an A plus piece of content? It's your company, it's your POV, it's your authors, it's your experts. And that's something that a lot of companies are very bad at, in my opinion.
Jon Clark (45:43)
I really like that wisdom. You know, a lot of times you say put your expertise in it, but wisdom is different, right? I like that.
Patrick (45:48)
No, wisdom. Yeah. Yeah. We
use wisdom. Seth's been talking about this for years and he's right because that's really what it is, right? Every time I go and I to a group of folks at a company, I go, what's the most important thing in this room right now? And everyone's like, I don't know what this guy's talking about. I go, you. I'm like, and your collective wisdom about what, and you can use that and put that onto your site,
and put that on and create content around it. And everyone's like, yeah, that does make sense. It's like that, it's a very important piece that people miss.
Jon Clark (46:19)
Yeah. All right. Next one. Reddit presence.
Patrick (46:21)
Right where it should be, you know, so like that on the border of overrated and right where it should be. Listen, the Reddit thing is a funny conversation depending on who you're talking to, right? There are some people who do Reddit really well, like Sonos does Reddit really well. There are some people who have bombed out on Reddit and have made a big mistake and all of sudden they get review bombed and you can really do it wrong. Because again, like if you go on Reddit, you gotta have rules. Don't talk about money,
Jon Clark (46:22)
Hahaha
Patrick (46:47)
you know, don't get into arguments with people and just provide value, right? If you can do that and it makes, and also you're legally allowed to be on, on, you know, on Reddit. You know, we work with a lot of, you know, compliance based sites, you know, companies, but I think it's right where it needs to be slightly overrated though. I think everyone is just like, like, I think people should experiment and dabble in, but everyone's talking about Reddit and I get it. It's highly cited. I totally get it. But I think people might be
overthinking how important it is to the overall picture of this whole thing. I think it's a good experiment for a lot of companies and can be a very good thing for certain companies, especially retailers. But largely Reddit can be a very dangerous and scary place for a company if you do it wrong.
Joe (47:27)
How do you feel about transcripts from your video?
Patrick (47:30)
Yeah, I think those are right where they need to be. I think people are doing those right, actually. That was something I would have said a year ago as underrated, but I think people realize that, like, instead of writing something, I can just talk into something, and then I can make a video out of it, and then use that transcript to do many other things. I think people have gotten actually very smart about that as they've realized how important YouTube is to the entire ecosystem, especially YouTube shorts.
Jon Clark (47:55)
About LLMs.txt.
Patrick (47:57)
Well, I mean right where it needs to be probably because everyone is curious about it I do I don't have anyone beaten down my door like saying like hey Pat like I need to do this today, people are just asking like should I do this, sure? It's not gonna hurt you, it probably won't help you in any way unless you have like an internal agent that it could help, but until that becomes an accepted protocol, it's it's just there right that and again, it's not gonna hurt anything, go do it. Sure fine.
But I think that's right where it needs to be because it's not really thinking but people are curious about it, but they're not like I have to do this is like a number top three thing I'm gonna do if that was the case I would say overrated.
Jon Clark (48:32)
All right.
Joe (48:33)
Wikipedia presence.
Patrick (48:34)
⁓ I think right where it needs to be, right? Wikipedia is important. People understand that. Continue to have a Wikipedia page, number one, and continue to curate it, right? It's a very important piece of the puzzle, but I think everyone knows that, right? I think that really hasn't changed that much. I think people get that Wikipedia is important.
Jon Clark (48:51)
What would be a successful version of the 2027 report? What would that look like? What would you expect to change there?
Patrick (48:58)
I would retail, like the interactions with retail to change and e-commerce because of the UC, because of the universal commerce protocol and that becoming more mainstream and more online. Like I would imagine that we would see much more activity around that industry. But also, again, I would think that we would see more traffic coming, more activity coming from LLMs, not a lot more.
But like if we came back next year and it was 1 % again, I would be surprised. I mean, I would be like, really? Like it didn't grow at all? You know, like that would be very surprising to me.
Jon Clark (49:34)
I think it'd also be detrimental to the industry, right?
Patrick (49:36)
I agree.
I mean, that means that that means that no one's using it. You know, like that means that or just it's just flattened out. I mean, and again, that's why like the the Gemini, the Gemini increase in the ChatGPT decrease is really like curious. And it's fascinating to watch because like ChatGPT, their monthly active users just keep going down and Gemini's keep going up. And like what happens to ChatGPT if they bought like if like, like, God forbid, they bought them out. Not that I think that's going to happen.
Jon Clark (49:49)
Mm-hmm.
Patrick (50:02)
But like, if Google really crushes them, like crushes their spirits? And you know, and they just go back to being like, hey, we're just here to build AGI, which is their point, like, which is also something people forget that ChatGPT is not a search engine.
Jon Clark (50:14)
Right. All
right. All right. Last question. If listeners remember only one thing from the AEO-GEO benchmark report, what do you hope it is?
Patrick (50:23)
Yeah, I mean, I hope it's that number, that 1%, right? Like, just remember that these are, we live in this hybrid world right now, right? Traditional search, which is influenced by AI, and AI search, which is this amazing emerging opportunity for everybody, right? But just remember that the lion's share of your traffic today is still coming from Google. And don't ignore it, because that's the biggest mistake I'm seeing companies make right now, is that they're not nurturing both. Nurture both. This is going to grow. It's going to explode.
Don't get me wrong, AI is going to explode. But we have to remember that this piece, this traditional piece, is still very important piece of the puzzle. And these two are converging right now. And that 1 % will turn into a bigger number. it's going to, like this traditional piece, is still going to be here. And you have to make them work together. And just remember that, like, they're going to work together. And even if it's 50-50 at one point, which may happen, that may happen in the future. I don't think it will, but maybe. You know, like, we have to remember that.
Continue to take care of your site from both ways because traditional search is a fantastic proxy for what's happening in AI search. There's no demand numbers in AI search yet anyway. So traditional monthly search volume, still a fantastic proxy to how people are searching in AI search. And these two things will continue to converge and mesh with each other. Just be aware of that number right now. That that is something just to take in and hold and say, OK.
This is something I have to pay attention to, but I still have to pay attention to this other thing because it will be extremely detrimental to your business if you don't.
Jon Clark (51:51)
Well said, Pat. Well said. Well, thanks so much for joining and being so transparent with the data and taking us through it. Let our listeners know where they can find you and if you're going to be speaking anywhere next.
Patrick (52:00)
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much. Yeah, so I do so you can find me on LinkedIn. That's that's the only social platform I'm on. I'm on there all the time, sharing thoughts and fun and bad jokes all the time. I do a monthly webinar called 30 30, you know, which I go through 30 30 days and 30 minutes. We have a huge group that comes every month, which I still don't understand why, but I'm blessed with it. I really appreciate the you know, you can come you can ask me questions. ⁓ I do audience requested, you know.
industry reviews every month, that's a lot of fun. And yeah, and come to Conductor.com and try a free trial, right? Like you don't have to pay a dime to try the technology out. You know, like come see if you like it. And if you ever have any questions, feel free to reach out to me directly at Reinhart at Conductor.com. I'm the easiest guy to find next to Seth, our CEO.
Jon Clark (52:45)
Amazing. Well, thanks again for joining us on the Page 2 Podcast. For the listeners, if you enjoyed the show, please remember to subscribe, rate and review. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.
Patrick (52:54)
Thanks,
guys.