SEO Got Rebooted. Here's the AI Playbook.
"I think this is a revival of SEO, a little bit of a resurrection."
SEO expert Patrick Rice is back, and this time he brought receipts. His agency got a Shopify brand to show up in ChatGPT recommendations 60-70% of the time and in Google AI Overviews 86% of the time, with a 35-40% sustained increase in branded search. All in six months. We dig into the exact GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) tactics that made it happen: web consensus through listicle outreach, structured data, Reddit strategy, and why the AI search land grab looks a lot like early SEO, before the filters catch up.
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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.
Kurt Elster • 00:00.001
This episode is brought to you in part by Swim. Here's the thing about wishlist apps. Most of them just sit there. A customer saves a product, and then nothing happens. Swim actually activates that data. When someone wish lists a product, you could trigger price drop or back-in-stock alerts and feed that intent directly into Clavio or your CRM. You're not guessing what people want because they've told you. Plus, customers can share wish lists for gifts, and your team can view them to offer personalized service online or in store. And unlike card abandonment, wishlist data is permission-based. These are people raising their hands saying, hey, I want this. Just not right now. Swim's been around for over a decade. It powers 45,000 stores and installs in about five minutes You can try it for free today at getswim. com slash Kurt. That's G-E-T-S-W-Y-M. com slash Kurt. Alright, today's show we've got a repeat guest, an SEO expert. There's no shortage of them on this show because I love them. I personally enjoy SEO. It's a fun topic. And uh two years ago, back April 2024, we had Patrick Rice on. And at that time, he was like, hey, did you know you can get ChatGPT to work in a Google Sheet? I said, no, I've never done that. And I did that and oh wow. That was like that was the moment that really opened me up to the possibilities of what you could do with AI and automation. And so, you know Credit to Patrick Rice for pointing me in the right direction and really uh opening up a a can of worms there for me. But um two years later, he has not stopped. You know, he has continued with with SEO and AI and that research. You know, not long ago we had Matt King from Domain On, and he was talking about a a then very emerging field, GEO, which is like SEO but for AI. And now we've got, you know, I don't I think that's gonna be a recurring topic here, uh, but I'm happy to bring Patrick Rice on because he DM'd me recently and said, hey, you know, I I got a case study where we got a coffee brand to rank in uh chat GPT pretty consistently. And that's the thing I'm interested in because I've had you know clients asking about it. And I recently read an article from the BBC. I don't know if you heard this. Um it's in uh BBC Tech. where a journalist got Google Google's AI Overview Gemini to say he's like the ultimate hot dog eating champion. And it was just by adding I think it was just by adding structured data to blog posts on his own site. And so that Like it very much feels to me like, wow, SEO kind of got rebooted here and a lot of what became black hat tactics now is just a thing you could do, you know, potentially. But I've not attempted this. I want to hear it from the expert who has achieved success with this. Patrick Rice, thanks for joining me.
Patrick Rice • 02:57.560
Thank you, Kurt. And um uh I appreciate your your appreciation. Uh sorry that I I uh overloaded you with Chat GPT and sheets. Um but it's been a while. I mean when we first talked, yeah, we were um you know, nerding out about uh GPT and sheets and now I mean you have like open claw agents that are talking to each other and Like the world just keeps changing. Um and then on on our side uh agency's been growing and we've been um uh lucky enough to work with so a couple great brands. Um two in particular that we've been able to actually have uh results for within the GEO sort of space. Uh lots of my friends are also doing all kinds of tests and WhatsApp groups where doing the same similar thing to what you mentioned where it's like If uh you know you have some kind of longer term query, uh you can get the AIs to say all kinds of crazy stuff. So really early days, um uh but a lot of fun um and a lot of like unknown in the future. So it's an exciting place to be and I definitely think people should be considering it.
Kurt Elster • 04:04.060
So I I did not mention uh the name of your your agency or business, but it it's pretty easy. Patrick Riceco.
Patrick Rice • 04:10.700
We keep it simple. PRC is what the team calls it. Um But yeah, we're we're Patrick Riceco. Um uh we actually have uh eight people now, so we're a good little boutique agency.
Kurt Elster • 04:22.440
Um and that's a fun size.
Patrick Rice • 04:24.360
Yeah, I like it. It's been really beautiful, like just being able to mentor people and uh like having them be really excited about everything going on. So uh I've been having fun.
Kurt Elster • 04:34.120
So you since you were last on, you we were talking a lot about tools. I love tools. You also got me hooked on Screaming Frog. as well.
Patrick Rice • 04:41.580
Good. It's an incredible tool.
Kurt Elster • 04:43.580
For especially for like migrations and then just checking for bad links on Shopify stores. And since then, Shopify has added support for um signatures. Which is a way to say to authorize a s a link scanning tool like Screaming Frog to go through your site at high speed without triggering a block. You know, if you just attempt this without the signature. Shopify will rightly say, Stop Yo, too many requests. You get a break now.
Patrick Rice • 05:09.280
Yeah, in in Shopify's favor, that's actually great security. Uh when I first saw that on Screaming Frog, I was impressed by their security. Uh 'cause it is kind of hard to crawl a Shopify side. So the signature is really nice.
Kurt Elster • 05:21.440
Yeah, now that we have that, uh no longer hard. You know, it's very easy. Um but assuming you know you're comfortable with screaming frog, which it's a little technical, but For this kind of work, when she I just followed a few YouTube tutorials and then I I I was over the hump, I figured it out, and yeah, I've been using it consistently since. Um but that, you know, that was April 2024. What's What's different now? You know, what are how have your tools changed? Back then it was um I but it was SEM Rush, Screaming Frog, and Keyword Research. What's that tool stack look like today?
Patrick Rice • 05:54.160
Yeah, and then another one uh was Matrixify. So I'm big fan of Matrixify.
Kurt Elster • 05:58.480
Oh, we all are. That's my my number one favorite Shopify app.
Patrick Rice • 06:02.000
Like what would you do without Matrixify?
Kurt Elster • 06:04.600
I know. It's it yeah, I can, but it it's a utility. But it's such a you can uh export import uh almost any entity, like product collection, customer whatever, from your store in a spreadsheet, update it there, analyze it, whatever, and then even update, push it back into Shopify. And it just, you know, gives you a lot of options, has good documentation. That's, you know, an app we all know and love.
Patrick Rice • 06:26.160
I my tool stack has changed um with really only two main tools that I would say are like uh very impactful, which is first SEO Gets. Um SEO Gets, uh shout out to them, small tool. Um what it does is that it pulls in all your Google Search Console data. Um so Google Search Console, best data for SEO. You get all the keywords, all the sort of data from Google. Uh SEO Gets will give you that data, make it way quicker, um, give you all kinds of cool views, extract all kinds of knowledge from the data. So a really great tool we spend every month. That's like how we uh choose our opportunities, how we analyze success. We annotate all of our changes in SEO gets so we can see the before and after negating branded search or whatever we want to do. So um SEO gets is a big one. Lots of opportunity there. And then moving into some of the AI stuff, this is brand new for me. uh really just in the last six months. Um but our favorite tool right now is profound. Um it's very expensive. So the alternative that I've been using as well is prompt watch. Um kind of just depending on I think they all kind of do a fairly similar thing. Um so uh I've tried Gumshoe, Peak, Prompt Watch, Profound, LLM's refs. Uh and maybe one other, but those are the main ones.
Kurt Elster • 07:50.580
Um for me, I believe I picked Peak just because I I liked the pricing. I think I was comparing Prompt Watch Peak and uh Um was the one you said was the most expensive? Profound.
Patrick Rice • 08:01.520
Oh profound, yeah.
Kurt Elster • 08:02.560
I saw profound pricing and they threw up on my shoes. That class of tools, what's it called, what's it do?
Patrick Rice • 08:08.260
Yeah, so it's AI visibility tools. I would say don't get too caught up in the AI visibility measurement tools I think that they're very useful for a few key things. But I do uh see even myself kind of getting too wrapped up in measurement. Measurement's very difficult in AI right now. Attribution's very limited. Um, you know, it's tough for executives and people that want to measure stuff, uh, but it's very hard to measure this stuff. The class of tools though do work um for one main metric or KPI, which is visibility. Ignore all the other metrics the tool will report on for the most part. The main thing is visibility, which is if I open up my Chat GPT or my Google or whatever AI I'm using. And I ask it a question, like, what are the best coffee brands? And I ask that question just over and over and over again on different days, different times, uh different accounts. I just keep asking that question to the AI. And then if I took all of those answers and then I extracted out the brands from each one that it recommended, uh, which are the ones that show up most often? So what is the percentage that your brand shows up? out of all of those answers. That's pretty much the only metric we can really get an idea of. Other metrics like what position it's in, like are you the first brand it mentions or the fifth? Uh Ran Fishkin just did a great study on this. The the AIs are so probistic and kind of random that like you can't really judge those pieces of data. You can just be like, okay, there's a few brands that AI usually recommends more often than other brands. Like how can we increase how often it recommends us somewhere in its answer? Okay. So those tools allow us to pick a set of prompts around our niche or our industry and uh measure that across different AIs.
Kurt Elster • 10:12.180
Similar to in traditional SEO, we're looking at search engine ranking position. I have a keyword or keyword phrase, probably a long tail keyword phrase. And then you know when I search it, how consistent where do I pop up, you know, in in those search results? Am I do I appear at all? Am I in the first 10? Great. I'm in the the the first page. Am I in the top five, top three? Am I number one? Oh my gosh. You know, that we it was much easier to digest, also h somewhat harder to do, harder to game, uh, as those algorithms got more and more sophisticated. So what's different here?
Patrick Rice • 10:45.540
The big difference uh is in SEO we have uh keyword tracking. So you can see over time what position you are And they are pretty consistent. Like usually the top three will be more consistent than everything else. Um so there'll be kind of like cons some consensus on Google and Bing on like what are the top players. I do think you have a similar thing here with AI. It's just much less a uh honestly, it's kind of always been this way, but with Google it was easy to convince ourselves that Uh like there was a simple, you know, what what lit number are you from one to ten? It was always kind of probabilistic. 'Cause like depending on your uh Chrome browser, depending on your history, depending on the right.
Kurt Elster • 11:33.360
Yeah, it would personalize the results to you.
Patrick Rice • 11:35.360
Yeah. So AI is just the next level of that. So it's all probabilistic. It's like um like our success here with the recent case study is getting us to be mentioned um in our desired prompts like 70% of the time. And that's like it getting any higher than that, now we're just kind of, you know, inching up a little bit as much as possible. But it's kind of that. It's all probabilistic.
Kurt Elster • 12:00.660
So one thing I've the the trends we've heard, the the pain points for for merchants, for Shopify store owners In 2026 are my customer acquisition costs are higher than ever. Yeah, everybody feels it. And hey My organic search traffic, you know, the the somewhat free traffic I was getting from Google down 30 to 40 percent is not unusual. And so we're looking for alternatives. Is traditional SEO dead?
Patrick Rice • 12:30.820
No. I find SEO uh and GEO to be very similar. But there are some new tactics that if you're looking for more free traffic and sales that can work well in the AI space right now, um and in GEO that's a little bit different than S SEO. But I don't think SEO is dead. I actually think this is a revival of it. A little bit of a resurrection of SEO, because it's been uh it's been up and down like always.
Kurt Elster • 13:03.300
Um yeah, we've heard SEO is dead uh countless times in the last twenty years. Yeah, that's amazing.
Patrick Rice • 13:11.820
It's quite interesting because even I'm like, will it ever happen? Maybe. But I think as long as uh AIs are uh rooted in the internet and in information on the internet, it's almost always going to be a factor, right? Backlinks are just other websites mentioning you, your own website, how it talks and mentions you and conveys the information. Uh, you know, AIs are just eating this up.
Kurt Elster • 13:38.100
Yeah. So let's let's let's apply it in a a practical approach. You've got a a client Purity Coffee and the goal was to get them to appear more often in these recommendations. What was the prompt? What was are you the questions we're trying to get it to appear in? Walk me through that project.
Patrick Rice • 13:55.600
Yeah, so um we had a list of topic buckets, and I am gonna uh censor some things so that you know I don't get too information, too much information out. But we essentially on profound you have the topic buckets. So um we chose about 10 topic buckets, you know, um looking at different uh types of the product, different attributions of it, sort of how they wanted to show up on those prompts. Um and it is a sub niche, so it is good to choose something that's a little bit more niche.
Kurt Elster • 14:28.940
You know, similar to SEO
Patrick Rice • 14:30.480
Similar to SEO, right? Um if you're trying to compete in running shoes and you're competing with Nike, I mean I'm sure if you write Yeah, what are the best running shoes and uh you're gonna be competing with Nike, Reebok, etc. Not gonna be really able to get your foot in the door. And so then we had about uh 10 prompts per topic bucket Uh just for various ways that people might search these. Uh Ran Fishkin in his study, and uh I can share you the link, it's SparkToro did it. Very good. Um, they saw that AIs do kind of come across an understanding of intent, similar to Google, where if you are asking for a particular thing, even if you ask it ten different ways Typically we're seeing that you get similar brands back. So like if you say, you know, uh best coffee versus what is the best coffee, like you're typically gonna get the same sort of uh results. It does seem like, you know, there's infinite variety of how you can prompt, but it does, you know, kind of corales over like the same uh entities or brands that it sees across the internet.
Kurt Elster • 15:44.980
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Patrick Rice • 16:51.860
Yeah, I mean a example prop would be something like what is the best coffee? But um uh yeah, so it's essentially something like that. Another example might be, you know, what are the best lightweight waterproof tense, right? So you want to kind of go a little bit more long tail and then it's going to recommend a specific set of uh answers And so those are going to be the topic buckets. And then the AI tool will be able to check visibility across those, see how often those brands are being recommended and and that's pretty useful for just getting an idea of your success uh and then beyond that you can see what are they citing. So what is the actual citations for those That's what I find to be more powerful. Measurement is useful, right? It's it's a good measurement to see like how are things working, even beyond just profound and peak and prompt watch. I would say just Google Search Console data is still at the best. So what we saw with both uh clients that we were able to increase leads from AI um is that there's two main signals that really were the clearest, which was branded search increase. So most of the time with ChatGBT or Google AI overviews, if you ask something like what is the best coffee or what's the best coffee brand, they'll literally just list out the brands. So most people when they see that they're going to uh copy the brand name, research it on Google. For Google AI overviews, if you click it, it'll even go to a Google search of the brand. And that's always going to lead to a sustained increase in branded search queries. So it's a weird measurement, but both times we've seen like a 35% in one case. about a forty percent in the other of sustained over three months increase in branded search confirming with the client that there was no like you know huge promos, uh or like any kind of reasons outside of this. And it seems like just every day there's a sustained increase like on our branded uh name. And so that's like one of the best first party data is like outside of just measurement tools.
Kurt Elster • 19:09.580
All right, I have attempted I've I've attempted to guess and I've tried a whole bunch of different prompts or I'm just trying to guess at something to get it to recommend me the brand in question. I can't do it, but I also don't know what you are optimizing for. Um yeah, I feel like I've just tried stuff. Like best antioxidant coffee. Best antioxidant instant coffee. But then also obscuing the thing, you know, because I've got like all the previous context and the history.
Patrick Rice • 19:35.120
Yeah, yeah, and and I could share you uh that data, but uh still wanna I get it. Yeah okay if if you want me to beep it out I could say it
Kurt Elster • 19:44.380
Oh yeah, no we'll censor it. Let's do it. Censor it so I could try it.
Patrick Rice • 19:48.460
Coffee Coffee, all that kind of stuff Google AI overviews, it's almost like constant. ChatGBT is is uh worse. That's what we're working on now. It's about about 60% So it's about 86% of the time on Google AI overviews, 60% on ChatGPT, 70% on Perplex.
Kurt Elster • 20:08.500
Okay, this is interesting. I got it. I had to. . ChatGPT I couldn't get to do it, but I didn't try it incognito. Google, it didn't do it. When I opened an incognito window in Google, immediately your brand is uh second result. So it worked. Um, but it is yeah, it's like, you know, anything with SEO, the personalization gets in the way of testing, and that's where these tools are helpful.
Patrick Rice • 20:34.660
Yeah, no, it really is. And that's why probability and uh data is where uh it can be a good directional signal. So like in Google Search Console, um like our branded search for that brand. has gone up 40 or 35% just on our branded term. Nothing like over the last three months compared to the last previous three months and last three months compared year over year.
Kurt Elster • 21:01.140
So there's SEO benefit to this approach as well.
Patrick Rice • 21:05.940
Yeah, and like the main KPIs we're using on that project are uh branded search increase. Uh visibility increase, uh, but also uh new customers acquired from organic. Um because uh new customers acquired on organic is probably the cleanest data point Because a lot of as as you build up AI visibility, um People are going to be searching the brand and they're gonna be it acquired from essentially the organic SEO channel. even if it is AI. And then you know one of our other clients just pretty much just asks people constantly. And he's like, it's like, yeah, a lot of people are coming from AI. Um, but both cases from like a data standpoint, we saw a large increase in branded.
Kurt Elster • 21:57.059
And okay. Well, the other one I just tried, uh Perplexity. I don't know if you use Perplexity. The AI search engine. I love Perplexity. Have never paid for it, uh, but I use it all the time. It that one, top picks overall, your brand, Purity Coffee, number one for your phrase. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean it depends like I mean there's a lot of factors here, but yes, okay. I have I've confirmed this. I've now like perplexity is the one that did it consistently. Um but The so what what's the strategy here? You know what is what went into uh making this happen?
Patrick Rice • 22:33.640
Yeah, so the biggest thing that we've learned uh through both projects was what I would say is web consensus. So it's a form of link building. Which is essentially just they're using citations. You ask Chat GPT, um you'll all you'll almost always see like a searching function. They're going and gathering citations and just kind of looking at what the internet says. And so uh for one example we did a large scale um just uh affiliate program kind of stuff. Where we go out to, you may have heard it before if you're researching GEO stuff. It's like listicles is probably the biggest thing people have been talking about. Yeah. Um and so listicles and Reddit. And those are both.
Kurt Elster • 23:23.860
That's the one we heard a lot of. Yeah. Especially like talking about it a year ago. It was like, all right, it You've essentially Reddit comment spam is the solution, which didn't feel great.
Patrick Rice • 23:33.120
No, it didn't feel great. Uh so uh we've seen um out of the two projects, one is focused on more list goals, the other is focused a little bit more on Reddit, but being very careful. And we actually worked with a partner there on some of the Reddit stuff. But it didn't work, which is interesting. I'm mostly curious about sort of what's working. Uh on the listicles, uh they work well, but both cases you have to be very careful 'cause um like you you can just spam everything to death and and maybe that'd work, but do you really want to do that for your brand? Probably not. And so the listicles, uh, the way that we did it was with uh affiliate programs and reaching out in a natural way, personalized way. Uh looking at the citations and just saying, hey, if you're research if you're reviewing, you know, uh the best of XYZ product Just reaching out to them, giving them a competitive affiliate program, and uh sending them a product and asking them for inclusion in that list. So that was a major factor. Those are listicles, as well as um publishing your own listicles. Um and that's where it gets a little bit that feels recursive. Right. It gets a little bit uh a little bit uh gray hat kind of thing. Um, but we didn't really do that much. Um, especially for for this project. The other project, we did more of that, which is just Publishing articles saying like, you know, what are the best XYZ or like what is, you know, what makes you know, this good all kinds of questions like that. You mean like comparisons between brands? So brand X.
Kurt Elster • 25:16.740
That's the one we saw in practice, the comparison ones. Yeah. We have a a brand that discovered uh in Google search a product, a new product was being recommended over theirs by Google AI Overview. you know, on on search terms relevant. And they didn't like that. And they they came to me with the solution. They said, hey, we've, you know, we're gonna write our own article similar to what they did, and we're gonna add, you know, we want to add this thing called JSON structured data. You know, they they knew they needed it, but of course it was technical. So that part I did um, you know, essentially turned these articles into like FAQ JSON um style snippets and then just drop that into the theme as a custom liquid template or custom liquid section. And so that then you know the theory here is structured data, JSON, is just easier for the AI to ingest so it has a preference for it. Mm-hmm.
Patrick Rice • 26:07.820
Yeah, JSON is great. Um, structured data is very good. And uh when it comes to like how to do GEO and how to uh increase visibility for your brand. It comes down to one, which is web consensus, which is as basic as like what are blog articles saying about your brand? What is Reddit saying about your brand? What it what is like even like review sites like Trustpilot, uh BBB, like especially if you're local, like BBB is very important. Like Better business bureau and stuff like that. Um so what are all those sources saying? If you think of like a traditional search engine, if you searched your brand and if you searched Fast XYZ and where do I buy this? What all these terms, like what shows up? The AIs are crawling all of that. They're extracting all that information. They're eating the internet is a way you can kind of think about it. And so like what shows up.
Kurt Elster • 27:03.600
Yeah, that's always been the joke is like, you know, what what's the response you get from ChatGPT? Well, the gross stuff it ate on the internet.
Patrick Rice • 27:09.680
Yeah. Exactly. And I'm that's part of the problem with AIs too. Like, you know, you're not always gonna get the best answer, right? Don't trust everything you read on the internet. it. But they do do a pretty good job at um like getting some kind of consensus. So that's why it's very difficult to like you don't really need to do you shouldn't do geo in hyper competitive spaces like running shoes because there's just too much content on the internet about like Nike and Reebok and like there's no way a new running shoe brand
Kurt Elster • 27:37.840
can ever compete with the amount of information that's out there on because you're also like you're competing against all of the content that came before AI ate the internet, right? Like it's just you're not gonna overcome that.
Patrick Rice • 27:52.060
Yeah.
Kurt Elster • 27:52.460
With a a broad enough category. You know? Yeah. Um there's a thing.
Patrick Rice • 27:56.620
And so you have to be you have to be pinpointed. And if uh like maybe you can try to And this is where you had to take, you know, discernment very seriously. Like maybe you could try to, you know, get in on a very subset of running shoes. You know, like running shoes for people with, you know, like some kind of like foot. disability, right? But then it's kind of like, well, does that fit your brand? And and so on. So I think uh SEO has always been this way, which is that you have to be very conscious of who you're working with and what your brand is and whether this stuff uh really applies to you. Um But I will uh push it back to just what you can do. So once you've determined that you want more visibility, which I do think is a smart idea if you're in a More of a niche where you can be a uh a leader in that sub-niche. Then it's really about web consensus. And then after that, it's about traditional SEO. So that's kind of where you were getting at. Like structured data, schema, comparison articles, like That's st that's technical SEO.
Kurt Elster • 29:02.380
That's stuff we would have done and benefited from before AI.
Patrick Rice • 29:06.600
A thousand percent. Like if you look at any of these uh SAS companies, like they always have like the verses articles, they always have and this was all done way before you know Chas.
Kurt Elster • 29:15.800
Yeah, they were doing that yeah five, ten years ago as well.
Patrick Rice • 29:19.240
Yeah. And so uh like I do think it's it's funny when when sometimes people come to me and uh they're they're thinking it's you know, this this brand new thing, but it's definitely an evolution. Like I would find that these these listicles, Reddit, and stuff like that are working really well right now. But it's almost like they're new SEO tactics. Like they're new things that work within AI. Um but yeah, if you don't have a website that's fast, like if your website is exceptionally slow, if it's super JavaScript heavy, like the AI crawlers just as Google will kind of just like Give up. Like a lot of times if there's a ton of JavaScript, they can't crawl it very well.
Kurt Elster • 29:58.519
Um it's resource intensive to render and view. Like for an AI, viewing a website is actually quite a lot of work. Um, and so if it's gonna run into a roadblock, unless it really needs it, it's just gonna move on to something else. Here's some customer service emails you don't want to wake up to. I was drunk. This was a gift. But we broke up. Wrong color, wrong size, wrong me. Sound familiar? With Cleverific, you don't have to deal with these anymore. Clever If it gives your customers a self-service portal to edit their own orders. No emails, no back and forth, just simple fixes. fewer support tickets, faster fulfillment, and happier customers. Peter Manning New York slash their order support requests by ninety nine percent. You can too. Get fifty percent off the Cleverific Pro plan, just forty nine dollars a month, exclusively. for the unofficial Shopify podcast listeners. Go to cleverific. com slash unofficial and use promo code Kurt50. Fix the problem before it's a problem. That's Cleverific What was the timeline here from when you said, all right, we want to rank for you know whatever phrase to being able to consistently do it?
Patrick Rice • 31:08.539
Yeah, so it was uh six months. Uh so uh pretty clean. um time period. It's really looking over the last three months to the previous three months that we've been uh seeing a lot of the data and then also comparing it year over year Um and both periods look really good. Um and uh yeah, so it took about uh six months of aggravating the data getting on these listicles and Reddit and things like that. Um as well as doing I mean like basic tech Basio Yeah, we've been doing that for eight years. So, you know, we improved the schema, we improved the content, we improved the even the collection page content, all of that kind of stuff. We added FAQs, um, you know Tons of just tip typical technical SC. I mean all the heading tags were everywhere, like just getting a very clean structure, um, alongside getting more Essentially backlinks. Yeah. Uh which would be the SEO term.
Kurt Elster • 32:08.880
But they say this is all very tradi this traditional SEO stuff, which we've known is like you know engage in regular SEO does benefit. uh AI search as well. So that there's this article that you went went around a couple weeks ago, uh BBC Future, and the titles I Hack ChatGPT and Google's AI, and it only took 20 minutes. And the thing the guy does is write an article on his website, just one article publishes it, uh, and supposedly that then suddenly Gemini AI goes, oh, this guy is the world hot dog eating champion. Right. Like have you have you read this article?
Patrick Rice • 32:41.600
No, I haven't. It sounds pretty funny.
Kurt Elster • 32:43.920
Okay. Yeah. Where you know he's talking about, hey, you could you know the here's this trick to manipulate what AI is doing.
Patrick Rice • 32:52.460
That's uh true. Like I've seen a lot of people do similar stuff like that. Um, but only for very long-term queries.
Kurt Elster • 33:00.919
Then okay, that is yes. Like he's he said I he spends 20 minutes writing an article and he links to it. It's called it's hotdogs. html, and the title is the best tech journalist at eating hot dogs. So that's Like no one is searching for that phrase until he came up with it right then. That's a brand new sentence, right? You know, the best tech journalist at eating hot dogs.
Patrick Rice • 33:22.460
That's why I say who has ever thought about that?
Kurt Elster • 33:24.840
Yeah. But to your point, it's like okay, you you're not gonna compete for best running shoe, but yeah, best tech best hot dog eating tech journalist, sure.
Patrick Rice • 33:33.720
Right, right. And I mean I I think there are strategies out there that work pretty well that are based on long tail. So I mean like you could do, you know, best running shoe for and then XY's foot disease, right Right. Like I'm sure there's probably like a hundred different types of foot, like disorders and things. And then you could create articles on all of those, publish them all to the internet, publish them to Medium, LinkedIn, all these places. Um you could publish a Reddit post on it. So that kind of stuff can work. And maybe it'd work well at scale. I haven't tested, I don't know. We did a little bit with like longer tail stuff like that. But yeah, I mean it's very long tail. It's super easy if you're gonna say, you know, like Uh Bass SEO that's uh that's a ginger and named Patrick Rice.
Kurt Elster • 34:24.400
I guess I'd name starts with P I'm for sure you could rank for it. But then like again, you know, to your point, later in the article they quote uh an SEO consultant and he says, you know, anybody could do it. You just put your own branded number one in a listicle and other brands two through six and your page is gonna get cited. And that like that was your strategy Um, so there's definitely there's other people doing this. Like for sure this this works right now and it's out there, uh, but is this, you know. Years ago, blog comment spam it was everywhere. Now I think you know listical article spam is the thing we're gonna see a ton of.
Patrick Rice • 35:04.860
So will it be long term is a really good question. I think it depends on how you're doing it. Um because even in this project Our approach was not just to host on any old website. Like typically in SEO you have a ton of guest post farms is what they are called. Right? You just like Any website that's like, you know, they'll they probably already own a hundred websites and they're like, yeah, pay me 50 bucks and I'll post something Um no. So that's kinda like standard get guest post farms. And uh I mean some of those can work to be honest. Like if they're a good website, they have traffic and stuff like that. Um they can push ranking on Google. Um but a lot of them are really bad, so you have to be Very careful. Um rather than doing that kind of thing, which still can work in AI, AI has less filters. Um We focused on what is currently being cited, what's currently ranking well uh on Google, and what's like niche relevant. So we were mostly looking at people that actually had blogs and and good posts that were relevant, written pretty well, not just AI content. And most of the time we were sending them products and I could kind of tell that they have actually written the content. It wasn't just like, you know, AI spam that they Right.
Kurt Elster • 36:25.840
Yeah, it turned out that's the new Turing test. It's like, oh, it's still using M dashes, huh? Yeah, yeah.
Patrick Rice • 36:31.760
Like you didn't even add any images to this post. You didn't literally do anything. Um and so uh the hope there is that we're going about it a little bit of a better way. Right now I do think it's a Wild West where a lot of this stuff uh just works. Like Reddit spam works very well. Um and I I don't do it. Like the only way that we've you know are comfortable doing Reddit stuff is if it's totally like non um it's not just like oh we're posting our own post and it's saying we're the best. Like uh I am very careful with that. Um even on the list goals, I like to add like this is a sponsored uh post or this is like like you know, this brand is us, um, but then here are the other brands.
Kurt Elster • 37:16.880
So we we try to do our best. Yeah, that transparency should be there.
Patrick Rice • 37:20.880
Yeah.
Kurt Elster • 37:21.559
Um and I I don't think the transparency will necessarily hurt the success of the AI result. If anything, it may, you know, accept it as more truthful. Mm-hmm.
Patrick Rice • 37:31.280
Yeah, yeah, it's not right now. And um I I think if you do it in a conscious way. Um like same with like Reddit comments, you can be like, well, what is the best um I mean, I guess we could use running shoe. Like, what is the best running shoe? You'd be like, hey, like uh I own this brand, um, but some other brands that I really enjoy are XYZ Or you could sometimes even like you can put it in your name or something like that. Like, Patrick, owner of this brand, or I some uh, you know, uh in your description and stuff like that. Um But uh yeah, I would say be careful. Um a lot of this stuff is working really well though. Like if you just have a bunch of Reddit bots and you post a Reddit post and you upvote it and then you know you say you're the best Uh it can work well. Um but you you should use you should use discernment. Um because that's this is also a lot of traditional black hat stuff, which I've always I've always stayed away from and it just the the Wild West where it does work right now. Um, it may not work forever. Like I would imagine that they're going to have Already uh people have theories, no clue if this is true yet, but they have theories that AI is starting to actually talk to the owner of Clear Scope. uh which is an uh SEO tool. And um he was saying that he's seeing in his data that uh they're stop starting to uh deprioritize self-promotional listicles, um, which is like if it's on your own website and you're so if you write uh best XYZ on your own website and then you recommend yourself first. Like it seems like they're deprioritizing that. No clue if that's true. But I would imagine some sort of filters like this and some sort of iteration on the on the way it works will happen.
Kurt Elster • 39:19.180
Well, yeah, for sure. I think you know just as Google was able to optimize their algorithm to make you know Black Hat SEO tactics and spam harder and harder to manipulate search results. They're gonna get smarter about filtering this AI search manipulation as well. But, you know, if you could do something and it is it passes the th my three checks, my I call them the mail checks, moral, ethical, legal, hey, make hay while the sun shines.
Patrick Rice • 39:43.359
Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, that's that that's how I see it as well. I think um as long as you're transparent and I mean people have been a lot of it's like PR, like people have been sending product for review, which is gonna be one of the best things you can do. do like as a a Shopify brand if you're D2C or something like if you can just send out product reviews to blog posts Blog bloggers, YouTubers, you know, all this stuff. YouTube's recommended a lot on uh AI as well. So we're seeing YouTube and Reddit to be the two most popular on um AI citations. So I mean product reviews and all these things have been going on forever. So uh I think they're useful tactics if you have a cohesive strategy.
Kurt Elster • 40:24.500
For sure. So the you know, if I'm listening to this right now, I got a new store, so it, you know, it doesn't have backlinks, it doesn't have the you know AI citations. What you know, what are the what are the first three things I should do? What are the the top tactics I could take today to try and prepare?
Patrick Rice • 40:42.720
Yeah, so I would say first off, um just make sure that you have your fundamental SEO intact. So um I would focus on originally just like do you have keywords that you're targeting? Do you know like what you're targeting? Um, and then are those realistic? So like we were talking about, not best running shoes, but like best running shoes for XYZ. Um because even though AI doesn't use traditional keywords, they keywords typically reflect some kind of desire or interest within humans, within the people behind the screen. And they if there's a desire and interest in a product or in a thing, it doesn't really matter how they prompt it or how they ask the question. Like that's what you want. So you need your website to be focused on that. to be fleshed out in it and to kinda have like a a level of identity in it. So I feel like a lot of people just don't know they they kinda have have had it wrong a little bit from the start without knowing like what are they actually targeting with their SEO. if they're doing it. So if they're brand new, I would just say stick to the basics like SEO title tags. Like once you find some good set of keywords like SEO title tags, you know, making sure the website functions well, has good heading tags. Um if if you're not using it, JSON LD for SEO is fantastic. Shouts out.
Kurt Elster • 42:02.260
Absolutely.
Patrick Rice • 42:03.060
Honestly great tool. And so I get your basics in place. After that, I would say do a press release Um press release is a good way to s get out a bunch of content on um your stuff. So yeah, that's working with AI as well. So some people can get uh longer tail queries ranked in AI just from like shooting out press releases like PR Web, uh A and B Newswire. There's a few good ones that are pretty cheap. MagicPR. com is good. So get out some of that stuff. Uh and then if you're able to, uh we have a pretty good vendor for uh some Wikipedia stuff. Wikipedia is very powerful. Uh bad. Yeah. And so uh some of those sort of just external sources that you can get for uh relatively affordable prices, that's kind of building up your foundation. And then if you are a bigger brand that maybe has some of that foundation there or once you've built it up, then I would start going into like how can we increase the number of blog articles mentioning our brand. That'd be kind of like link building. How can we make sure that we're on really firm technical foundations, uh, which you would probably have to get some sort of SEO consultant? or team in on to to make sure that things are really nice on, or at least a dev team that knows SEO. Um and then yeah, start looking at uh Reddit and and some of the social stuff too if uh if you have the bandwidth.
Kurt Elster • 43:26.740
And okay, maybe well, are you taking on Shopify clients right now?
Patrick Rice • 43:32.260
Yes, we are.
Kurt Elster • 43:33.460
All right. That's good. Where do we go? Where do we find you?
Patrick Rice • 43:36.660
Uh patriosriceco. com. So patrickriceco. com. I do have if you go to patriceco. com slash AI, I am doing AI visibility audits. So um that's where we'll we'll check out uh some stuff on profound. Um they have their workspaces which is nice. We'll check out the Google Search Console data and just get an idea of uh where the visibility currently is at. Um and yeah, so we're doing that right now and we are taking on uh SEO, Google ads, and GEO clients.
Kurt Elster • 44:08.380
So um That's cool.
Patrick Rice • 44:09.740
Okay. It's uh it's fun for me.
Kurt Elster • 44:12.020
Yeah, I bet the uh you know, one of the things on my to-do list that I I put down yesterday and I've not gotten to it yet, is we just moved our agency site, ethercycle. com, to Shopify. And that really makes my life easier and what I could do with it. And I've got um all these articles and resources and case studies and stuff, I'm adding JSON structured data to it. And I'm just gonna we've got it written in as a meta field. You know? So that's I'm gonna do it manually. Like I'm I'm really hand tuning my approach here.
Patrick Rice • 44:39.340
Yeah. That's the way to do it. Um, I love it. Uh yeah, we use a lot of meta fields. I mean meta fields is just for SEO and all this stuff, it's It's incredible. Um and with uh uh JSON LD for SEO, you can uh It's Alana Davis's app, right? Yeah. Uh that that's it. Yeah, yeah. And um uh with that tool you can do custom JSON. It's a little bit complicated, but if you use uh you can get it to work. So she has a blog post on it. Um so you can do some custom JSON. But yeah, JSON is a great like for people that are especially if you're on a budget and you want to do some AI stuff um and SEO stuff in general, uh there are big wins in in schema for sure.
Kurt Elster • 45:21.059
Oh yeah, that's a you know another thing we've started doing for our retainer clients is just looking for those opportunities where it's like we could like we already have the structured data built into the theme, but it's gotta be all dynamic. And so what if, you know, then I pair that to meta fields on, you know, like a hero, and I don't have to do it for the entire site, but like, hey, I have a hero product and it's got an FAQ. Okay, well, why don't I make a separate JSON section that gets that FAQ in there? uh as structured data so that when someone asks Googles a question about this product, AI goes, oh, you know, I've got a primary source in a way that I is easy to understand. And it becomes that much more likely to surface that response.
Patrick Rice • 45:57.340
Yeah. Yeah, most definitely.
Kurt Elster • 45:59.740
It's fun. Plus, you know what? It's more it's more spreadsheet work for me. It's a more matrixify action, right? It's the the tools I love. Uh love to use.
Patrick Rice • 46:10.860
So okay, I'm I'm here to give you more spreadsheet work.
Kurt Elster • 46:14.540
Yeah, for you know that for me that's fun. Uh it's just more toys. Uh okay, I've got I've got some some work to do. I have uh spreadsheets to mess with, JSON to write, and I'm excited. You know the SEO was fun for me fifteen years ago when it was you know a little more wild and then over time, you know, there it was just like, hey, make great content and you know Keep your head down and hope it works out. Now we're back to, well, there's some like pretty off-the-wall things you could try, and then maybe you get out, you know, wildly rewarded. by doing it. And so I'm gonna try it. I'm gonna put in the effort, put in the structured data, make the content, you know, and see if we can uh increase that uh Google organic search results again. You've inspired me. Thank you, Patrick.
Patrick Rice • 47:00.400
Yeah, thank you, Kerr. I appreciate it. Uh love to be on again, so I appreciate your time.
Kurt Elster • 47:06.680
Hey, before you go, I was hoping you would check out our new app, Promo Party Pro. It is what I want to be the single best, easiest way to run a free gift with purchase promo on Shopify. We just put it live in the App Store. We've got less than 50 users. We want your feedback. So if you need to run a free gift with purchase promo in the near future, install it, try it. There's a live chat. I check that all the time. And so if you have any issues at all, you know, or any suggestions on how we can make it even easier to use, let us know. We're happy to help. If you want to try it, search promo party in the app store.
Kurt Elster • 47:43.020
Promo PartyPro is the app. Give it a shot. It's got a free trial. Thanks