Webinar Highlights: Evolution of Search, AI and Product Vision with Chief Product Officer Wei Zheng

Top Highlights:

1. AI Search is Mainstream: Nearly every major AI large language model (LLM) is now grounded in search, accessing and returning results from the internet (e.g., Perplexity, OpenAI's Search GPT, Claude, Grok). This is no longer a niche concern.

2. Google's New AI Mode: Google is experimenting with a standalone "AI Mode" search experience, separate from the AI Overviews in traditional SERPs, signaling a potential major shift in user interaction with search.  

3. Conductor's Evolving Product Portfolio: Conductor is expanding beyond traditional SEO tools to offer a suite of solutions focused on:

   • Content Strategy, Creation, and Optimization: Including an enhanced Writing Assistant with full content generation and brand voice customization.  

   • Website and AI Performance Monitoring: Introducing new capabilities to track visibility in AI search engines like Perplexity and Search GPT, focusing on brand mentions, citations, sentiment, and user intent.

   • Website Monitoring: Including AI agent log file analysis to understand how AI crawlers are accessing site content.

4. Upcoming Conductor Features (within the next month to two quarters):

   • AI Search Visibility Tracking: New reporting for AI search engines (starting with Perplexity and OpenAI Search GPT, then Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, Grok) measuring brand mentions, citations, sentiment, and topical understanding. (Alpha in ~1 month)

   • Enhanced Writing Assistant: Full content generation capabilities, brand profile integration for tone and voice. (Full content generation in Alpha, brand profile releasing next month)

   • Content Score 2.0: Updated scoring based on search intent and topical coverage for AI.

   • Content Gap Analysis: A new tool to identify content creation and optimization opportunities across an entire website by analyzing actual content. (Coming Q2)

   • AI Agent Log File Analysis: Part of Conductor Website Monitoring to track AI bot crawling. (Coming next month)

   • Cage Reporting 2.0: Bringing together technical site data, analytics (including AI referral traffic and conversion metrics), and search performance data.

Key Takeaways:

1. The Death of "Links and Ranks" as Primary Metrics: AI search engines prioritize direct answers over lists of links. Success will be measured less by keyword ranking and more by brand presence, sentiment within AI answers, and actual conversions from highly qualified AI-referred traffic.  

2. Topics Over Keywords: AI understands semantics and context. Businesses need to shift from a keyword obsession to a topic-centric strategy, focusing on comprehensive coverage and understanding nuanced user intent and personas.

3. Content is King, More Than Ever: High-quality, authoritative content that directly addresses user intent is crucial for visibility in AI. This includes optimizing not just website content but also ensuring presence on trusted third-party sources (e.g., Reddit, Quora, publisher channels) that AI engines frequently cite.  

4. Nuanced Measurement is Required: New metrics are needed: brand visibility in AI answers, sentiment analysis, referral traffic from AI, conversion rates from that traffic, and topical authority.

5. Technical SEO is Critical for AI Discovery: Proper schema markup, site structure, and potentially new standards (like "LLMTXT") are vital for AI engines to find, understand, and correctly interpret website content.  

6. Not All AI Tools Are Created Equal: Generic AI wrappers are insufficient. Effective AI content and visibility tools need deep industry data and sophisticated understanding of search, like Conductor's approach using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with competitive search data.

3 Action Items to Start Doing Today:

1. Shift from Keyword Tracking to Topic Modeling & Intent Analysis:

   • Today's Action: Start identifying the core topics your audience cares about and the various nuanced questions and intents (informational, navigational, transactional, personalized) they have around those topics. Move beyond a narrow list of keywords and think about comprehensive subject matter expertise. Use AI tools (even ChatGPT) to brainstorm user questions and intent variations for your key topics.

2. Audit and Elevate Your Content Strategy for AI:

   • Today's Action: Review your existing content. Does it directly and comprehensively answer user questions related to your core topics? Is it authoritative and trustworthy? Begin planning how to create "pillar content" for key topics and ensure your content is structured in a way that AI can easily digest and understand its relevance (think clear headings, structured data, natural language). Consider where your brand isn't showing up in AI answers for your key topics by performing some test queries in engines like Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews.

3. Prioritize Technical Foundations for AI Crawlers:

   • Today's Action: Review your website's schema markup. Is it comprehensive and accurate, especially for products, services, and organizational information? Ensure your site structure is logical and that AI crawlers can easily access and understand your content. If you have access to log files, start looking for (or prepare to look for) traffic from known AI bots to understand how they are interacting with your site.

Watch the full recording here