# AI is Eating Search Latent Space · 2025-07-23 Robert McCloy of Scrunch AI argues that AI is replacing web browsing, not just search, as consumers prefer ChatGPT and similar tools over traditional browsing. He explains that AI search platforms still rely on traditional search under the hood, but re-rank results based on metadata clarity—so clickbait titles fail while descriptive content wins. Prompt injection works currently but is a temporary tactic; the durable strategy is clear, structured content with server-side rendered HTML because AI tools don't execute JavaScript. Scrunch helps brands optimize for platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Meta AI; customer Clerk saw a 6x traffic increase and 9x conversion lift from AI-referred visitors. Robert predicts the future is about 'agent experience'—optimizing how AI systems interact with your content to serve end users directly. ## Questions this episode answers ### What conversion lift have businesses seen from AI search traffic compared to traditional search? Robert McCloy, co-founder of Scrunch AI, shares that customer Clerk, a developer infrastructure company, achieved a 6x increase in traffic from ChatGPT and similar AI sources, and a 9x increase in conversions. This suggests that visitors from AI search often have higher purchase intent, leading to better conversion rates compared to traditional search. [48:20](https://addtry.com/7cbba69b-61ba-4455-8264-923a917cea9b?t=2900000) ### Do AI search engines like ChatGPT execute JavaScript when crawling websites? Robert McCloy explains that ChatGPT and most AI search indexers do not execute JavaScript. If your content relies on client-side rendering, it may not be indexed or surfaced in AI-generated answers. To be visible in AI search results, ensure your content is rendered server-side so that it is available to these crawlers. [40:43](https://addtry.com/7cbba69b-61ba-4455-8264-923a917cea9b?t=2443000) ### Is AI search just replacing traditional search, or is something more fundamental changing? Robert McCloy argues that the impact of AI is broader than just search: it's replacing web browsing. He notes that users increasingly prefer to interact with AI tools like ChatGPT to consume content and solve problems, rather than clicking through multiple websites. This shift means businesses must optimize the complete agent experience, not just discovery. [14:25](https://addtry.com/7cbba69b-61ba-4455-8264-923a917cea9b?t=865000) ## Key moments - **[0:00] Intros** - **[1:29] Genesis** - [3:08] Robert McCloy: "Nobody wants to use a chatbot on your website... if things pop up... I fly into a visceral rage." - [5:31] Robert McCloy: Showing businesses how ChatGPT references them is scary; they don't know what's happening. - **[6:23] AI Search Stack** - [8:26] Robert McCloy: Most commercial queries in ChatGPT now use search, making optimization actionable. - [9:04] Robert McCloy: Exposing e-commerce seasonal sale info to AI training crawlers is probably counterproductive. - **[12:33] AI Browsers** - [13:56] Robert McCloy: AI is not just replacing search; it's replacing web browsing itself, a more fundamental shift. - **[16:06] Search Mechanics** - [16:07] Robert McCloy: AI search still relies on traditional search algorithms like BM25 and PageRank under the hood. - [17:52] Robert McCloy: ChatGPT's re-ranking step penalizes pages with clickbait metadata lacking descriptive info. - [20:46] Q: Do websites receive the ChatGPT prompt that led a user there? A: No, and likely never will due to privacy concerns. - [22:44] Swyx: A startup built a feature because ChatGPT hallucinated it existed, then users came looking for it. - **[24:05] AI SEO** - [28:03] Robert McCloy: 'Agent experience' is a better term than SEO/GEO; optimize the complete AI-mediated customer journey. - [29:05] Q: Does ChatGPT personalization affect search results? A: Yes, user instructions and memory significantly change AI search outcomes. - **[30:45] User Intent** - [31:45] Robert McCloy: Business users go to ChatGPT to solve problems, not search, making it the highest-intent traffic. - [34:15] Robert McCloy: Many people are using ChatGPT for B2B software bake-offs, comparing CRM systems and more. - **[36:02] Optimization** - [36:11] Q: Does prompt injection work to boost a page in AI search? A: Often yes now, but Robert McCloy expects it will lead to bans soon. - [36:54] Robert McCloy: AI search optimization is currently positive-sum; writing clear, descriptive content benefits users and platforms. - [38:45] Q: Does LMS.txt help with AI search discoverability? A: Robert McCloy says ChatGPT doesn't use it; not moving the needle yet. - [39:30] Robert McCloy: Optimizing for embedding similarity in AI search is not very relevant; focus on clear human-readable content. - [40:37] Robert McCloy: ChatGPT and AI search indexers don't execute JavaScript; server-side rendering is critical. - **[43:21] Deep Research** - [43:54] Robert McCloy: Deep Research's sequential reasoning can surface outdated information if content is inconsistent. - [46:13] Robert McCloy: For Deep Research, focused programmatic pages that answer complete queries work better than serial linking. - **[47:30] Case Studies** - [47:40] Robert McCloy: Clerk saw 6x ChatGPT traffic growth and 9x conversion lift by optimizing AI-targeted content. - **[51:37] Market Share** - [52:56] Robert McCloy: Perplexity is the second biggest AI native search platform after ChatGPT, with strong user consistency. - **[54:58] Wrap-Up** ## Speakers - **Alessio** (host) - **Swyx** (host) - **Robert McCloy** (guest) ## Topics Search ## Mentioned Clerk (company), Cloudflare (company), Google (company), Scrunch AI (company), AI Overviews (product), AI mode (product), Bing (product), ChatGPT (product), Claude (product), Comet (product), Deep Research (product), Dia (product), GPT (product), Gemini (product), Meta AI (product), Next.js (product), OpenAI browser (product), Perplexity (product), Tolbit (product), o3 (product) ## Transcript ### Intros **Alessio** [0:04] Hey everyone, welcome back to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel, and I'm joined by Swyx, founder of Small AI. **Swyx** [0:12] Hello, hello. Today, we're actually diving into a topic that I've wanted to dive into for a while. AI search, uh, engines have caused a lot of, uh, the, the sort of rising opposition force of AI search engine optimization. And today we have Robert from Scrunch AI. Welcome. **Robert McCloy** [0:27] Thank you. Yeah, great to be here. **Swyx** [0:29] Alessio, I think you, you are probably best placed to introduce Robert. **Alessio** [0:33] Robert, as a guest disclosure, uh, Decibel invested in the round that we're gonna announce with this podcast, so congrats, Robert, and I guess congrats to us for being picked by you. You were previously the, the CTO of HearSay, which was started by Clara Shih, who's also a friend of the podcast, and my partner, John, was on the board of HearSay, so you guys knew each other from there. So we kinda go, go back and even back then, you were already working on the space of, I have a business, how do I reach people in a way that is very, uh, tailored? And that was more on the financial services side. And then you started Scrunch couple years ago, so you were pretty early to the space. And then now everything is, is blowing up. Everybody's getting traffic from ChatGPT. So maybe talk a bit about when you first realized that LLMs and search was not just normal search, and maybe the idea maze that got you there, and we can take it from there. ### Genesis **Robert McCloy** [1:29] Yeah, absolutely. That's a, that's a great starting question. And the origin story, hopefully I don't get in trouble for telling this, um, on the pod. The origin story is a little bit convoluted, as I think it is for most startups, uh, with Scrunch. My co-founder, Chris, and I, we had left HearSay. Chris was actually also a long-time executive at HearSay. He was the chief product officer, uh, for a long time. He was the first employee, so we both know all those folks really, really well. Yeah, we were looking for essentially what to do next in our careers, you know, thinking about starting a company and kicking around ideas, talking to people we knew in the industry. And as we were doing that, the elephant in the room was AI, right? Like, it just became really clear, I think, a couple of years ago that, like, it would be sort of foolish to start a company without thinking about what the impact of, you know, LLMs would be on the world, and you'd already be behind if you sort of started a company that wasn't in some way LLM native. So we went through an exploration process there, and as we were talking to, like, the people we knew the best, who are often like, you know, sort of enterprise-y, uh, like large banks and insurance companies, that was a primary kinda audience for HearSay. It was a tough sell back then to, to sell them anything related to AI. And the number one thing that people were probably asking us for, quite honestly, was like, "Can you put a chatbot on my website?" Right? Like, "I'd like to have a little widget. I'd like to have my version of ChatGPT. I want people to come to my website and a widget will pop up, and then people can type into it and, like, ask my website questions instead of going to ChatGPT." And there are good versions of that now. The versions that were out at that time of that functionality, I'd say, were mostly not so great. But basically my core feeling about that at the time was like, nobody wants to use a chatbot on your website. I don't wanna use chatbots on people's websites. Like, if, if te- if things pop up on a website when I go to visit it, I just, like, I, I fly into a visceral rage. I'm definitely closing the window, if not th- if not closing the tab. So we didn't wanna do that. **Swyx** [3:20] I have that feeling, but also I wonder if the normies respond fine to it. You know, like Intercom is doing fantastic as a business, right? So I have a self-doubt about how representative we are. **Robert McCloy** [3:31] That's a fair question, right? And I always ask myself that as well as maybe kind of like a weird, uh, technologist person. You know, I think there's some evidence that people don't love it. I think Intercom's a little bit different because by the time you're engaging with, like, Fin, um, or what have you, hopefully you're in a relationship to a certain extent with the business. So I do think that people have a little bit more tolerance for using these AI tools, like, when they're already kind of feeling some rapport with a website or with a business, they're more willing to, like, use your tools instead of staying in, instead of staying in the environment they like to use. But if you're just coming to a website and it pops up, like, people mostly, I think, don't wanna do that. People have responded really positively to ChatGPT. Most people I've talked to, and I'm liv-- by the way, I live in LA. I've lived in LA for a couple years since pandemic, so I'd say, like, more of my social circle is normies than it used to be. Like, people love ChatGPT. The experience people have of using ChatGPT versus, like, browsing the internet, sort of the old Google ten blue links and clicking around, is, like, vastly more positive, you know, compared to the past. So people really feel, I think, like, an affinity for the tool, and they wanna use the tools they like. They wanna use, you know, whether it's ChatGPT or it's Claude, um, or Pro-Perplexity or what have you. Like, they really like that environment. It's convenient. It's productive. They don't have to browse websites that maybe aren't well designed for them. People are not excited about the idea of, like, "Okay, let me click around, find a website, and then engage with a chatbot there," in the same way that I think people aren't like, "Let me go to the website and use their search bar," right? People just wanna use Google. I do think that's, that's true, and when we had that realization of, like, okay, people are asking us for this thing, but we don't really wanna build it, we don't necessarily think that's, like, the durable value, we started asking ourselves, you know, "What is it? What are they trying to get to here?" And it came down, I think, to discovery and basically this realization that, like, AI was gonna change something about their website. It was gonna change something about their customer journey and how people sort of interacted with their business, but, like, not knowing exactly what it was. And as we started showing people, um, as ChatGPT Search was coming out, like, how ChatGPT Search was referencing their business, like, how it was surfacing their content or, like, what it was saying about their brand, we just had the experience of, like, having a lot of folks, you know, folks who are, like, CMOs at, like, large insurance companies or enterprise software companies or large, you know, e-commerce marketplaces. Uh, that's really scary. Like, it's saying stuff about my business. It's saying stuff about my brand. It's surfacing content from my website and, like, I don't really know what's happening here. And so that's sort of the genesis of how we got into this business, more than focusing on, like, SEO and performance marketing specifically, more like- There's just a change in the way consumers kind of interact with the internet. And I'd say that's still true today. Like, that's still sort of the core thesis of the business is, like, the consumer experience of the internet is changing really, really quickly for the first time in, like, quite a long time. Yeah. So I'd stop... I... Maybe I'll stop there, but that's sort of the, the origin story. ### AI Search Stack **Alessio** [6:23] Yeah. And I know, a-as you know, most people here are technical in the audience, so it would be nice to dive into that. I guess everything starts with a prompt in your world, which is what the consumer asks ChatGPT about some sort of product or market or whatever. And then how are you guys doing the monitoring? Are you monitoring every LLM? Are you monitoring every model plus search? Are you monitoring the AI native tools like Axian, things like that? Maybe talk people through the pieces of the stack here. **Robert McCloy** [6:53] Yeah. So what we do starts with what you said, which is we monitor prompts. Basically, we go out, and we sort of simulate consumer interactions with the major AI platforms. So we kinda go just by, by basically, like, usage. So ChatGPT obviously is, is among the highest usage. AI Overviews could be considered up there as well if you consider that in the same category. Um, AI Mode, Perplexity, and you can kinda go down the list from there. So we definitely don't cover everything. I'd say our ambition is ultimately, like, to sort of be wherever people are, um, wherever the consumer is, wherever our customers' audiences are. But today, we primarily focus on sort of the, the biggies, so ChatGPT, whether it's search or trained in model knowledge, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, which is important for, you know, uh, not necessarily huge in terms of raw number of users, but the people who do use Claude tend to be, like, a very valuable audience, especially for some types of company. And then also things like Meta AI, for example, which I don't think gets necessarily remarked upon a ton in the, uh, like, AI enthusiast, AI developer community, but, like, it's a silent monster, right? Because of Meta's distribution and reach. So it's expanding all the time. You know, we'll, we'll have more platforms live, like, probably by the time this podcast comes out. But we sort of start by focusing on, like, what are kinda... You said it before, what are the normies using? What are they doing? What are they seeing in these tools? **Alessio** [8:09] So now that you have search, they have the backlinks, but when you don't have search on, there's no way to figure out why a model is saying something. Is that a battle that basically people cannot fight? Like, there's something in the pre-training. Is there something that you advise people to do, or you just flag it, and that's it? **Robert McCloy** [8:26] It's definitely less actionable, right? And I, I think the, the good thing for brands is, like, generally speaking... By the way, when I say brands, like, throughout this conversation, that's just, like, our term of art, but I just mean, like, businesses, right? Businesses that have products and services and, like, websites and want you to do stuff on the internet to make money. I think it is less actionable, so most people, I think, are focused more squarely on, on AI search, so ChatGPT with the search box ticked. The good news is I think, like, most of the queries that lead to action that are sort of, of commercial interest are increasingly using search across these systems, like, for a bunch of reasons, right? Timeliness and, and avoiding hallucinations, and so on. So I'd say, like, most people are focused on that. There are things you can do even in pre-training mode, and an example of that is just thinking about, like, what are you exposing to these models when they do come and crawl your website, right? Everybody knows that GPTBot and CCBot and all these various AI training data collectors are hitting tons of websites on the internet. Some people are fine with that. Some people are, are upset about it, but they're identifiable. And you can think about the half-life of the information you're presenting and whether or not that's something that really makes sense to give to a training data crawler. So for example, like, you know, if you're an e-commerce company and you're running a seasonal sale, like, should that go into the trained-in knowledge of a model? Like, I would argue it's probably counterproductive, right? So maybe you don't wanna expose information about that to those crawlers hitting your website, and that's something we advise our customers on. **Swyx** [9:55] While we're here on the topic, um, any quick takes on what Cloudflare did last week, which was apparently start introducing paywalls for all these bots? **Robert McCloy** [10:05] Yeah, right? I mean, it, it's really interesting. Um, I kind of agree with the sentiment, I think, behind it, right? Like, I mean, obviously, it's tough to be a... It's tough to be a writer on the internet. It's tough to be, like, a content publisher on the internet, and it, it's getting tougher and tougher, I think, over time, um, whether it's ChatGPT or it's, it's Google AI mode. So the idea that where there's so-sort of maybe, like, grand bargain we need to make as a society to, like, compensate content providers, which I think is kinda what, like, uh, Matthew Prince is getting at with his blog post, does make some sense to me. I think there's two things to think about there, and one is, like, technical mechanism, which is, like, how does this paywall work? And I would just say, like, the bridge doesn't connect on both sides yet. Um, maybe we'll get there. So I don't think there's a lot of actual use of those systems. And there's, like, prior art, right? There's things like Tolbit, for example, that kinda have some similar ideas. I would say, like, there's some uptake in traditional media. It's not, like, a huge piece of infrastructure on the internet yet. And then the second thing I think is about power dynamics, which is, like, who wears the pants between website operators and CDNs and AI, in particular AI search or search engines in general, right? Because websites obviously are sensitive to how their content's being used, but they also need traffic. And traffic, by and large, comes from Google. It's increasingly coming from ChatGPT, as we've seen. You know, there's a fine line, I think, for people to walk where unless you've really got a strong native, sort of, like, organic audience of people who, like, know you, love you, like, have a relationship with you, which is still, like, one of the most important things you can do on the internet, you need to be careful about how restrictive you are with your content because distributing your content through these systems is, is how you're gonna get users. So I, I don't know the right answer, but I think it's, it's tricky. **Swyx** [11:51] So I find it a really interesting divide in society between, like, some content creators want their everything behind a paywall, wanna be paid for every single use, and then others Work very, very hard to make everything free so that, you know, like train on me, right? Like, uh, and it's-- if anyone cares about our position as, as content creators, everything in the in space is free. We have some like sort of soft gates, but it's not really actually, uh, something that we mon-- we, we care about. Like your content, content wants to be free. The, the cost of reproduction is zero. Like just get it out there, right? **Robert McCloy** [12:21] Right. **Swyx** [12:21] And, and actually, you know, maybe the Cha-ChatGPT will start referring more people to you, and you'll be more of an authority in your, in your space, all that good stuff. **Robert McCloy** [12:29] That's very real. And I think one, one thing I would just mention here is like they also have the AI browser announcements this week. You know, there's like Dia, there's, uh, Comet, there's, there's the untitled OpenAI browser. And I think that's a really interesting addition to this mix too, right? ### AI Browsers **Robert McCloy** [12:44] Because what I, what I kinda think about is like you sort of just said it, but it's that nineties phrase of like, information wants to be free and people wanna connect models to the internet. And so like the way people are using these today is going through ChatGPT or something, which feels like, you know, Google is a s-- is an input box in the middle of a pretty spartan webpage, and ChatGPT is like an input box in the middle of a pretty spartan webpage. So they feel pretty similar. They're both sort of like these internet platforms, internet gatekeepers, and people think about them the same way. But like there's no reason that has to be the way you consume internet content and get it into these models. And I think like the AI browser form factor is like a really interesting evolution there. There's gotta be others, right? There could be like local tools, local models. And what I would just say, right, is like you can fight the battle, I think, of saying OpenAI shouldn't consume your content without paying for it or shouldn't consume it at all. But I think it's gonna be really tough to fight the battle of saying like, LLMs writ large shouldn't consume my content because it's just not that hard to hook these things up to, to internet content and so-- to some degree. And like once it's in somebody's browser, right? Like how are you going to, to stop them? That's a whole different mechanism. Some people I think are thinking about this change when it comes to like AI search as like sort of one platform replacing another. So instead of Google, it's OpenAI, right? Or maybe it's Google disrupting itself, but I think there's sort of a more fundamental change, which is like people just have more powerful tools, have these AI tools, right, to consume web content. And I think what you're seeing with people who have access to the tools is like they don't wanna browse websites the same way they used to in the past, right? So like I actually think like this is probably like a medium spicy take, but it's like thinking about what's going on in AI as really replacing search is the wrong take or s-- maybe not that interesting. It's really more like AI is replacing web browsing. I think that's actually like a more meaningful, like more fundamental shift. And the reasons it's happening, I think, is 'cause, because people just like it better, right? It's not because of some like top-down platform mandate. Like people like using these tools to replace what they were doing before by the clicking around the internet and consuming content. Not like for every single use case, but for a lot of things that people are using websites today for that they prefer to use, you know, an agent. **Alessio** [14:52] Well, and deep research probably being the biggest- **Robert McCloy** [14:55] Right **Alessio** [14:55] ... example of that. On the content side, it's interesting because, um, so Lanny, who runs a very big, you know, product newsletter, um, he posted his stats from May tenth to last week, and ChatGPT drove more traffic than Twitter for him. Uh, which I'm surprised because he has two hundred and fifty thousand followers on, on Twitter, so... And he only had nine thousand views from it. So for us, Twitter is much higher than ChatGPT, even though we do get a good, a good amount of them. But I'm curious like how much you want to tell the models about who you are and not as much about the content. You know, you kinda wanna be present in the curation but not in the details, and then people in the details for you. This is something that people have been debating on shopping, which is when I'm using chat, ChatGPT to find something to buy, how much of the information should I put in the webpage so that it gets put in the context? **Robert McCloy** [15:50] Uh. **Alessio** [15:51] Versus on podcasts, if I'm searching for the best AI podcasts or whatever, how much does it need to know before it suggests me? Or is the model simply just using the same ranking as the SEO that Google API, Bing API are using? ### Search Mechanics **Robert McCloy** [16:07] So, so I mean, this gets, this gets into the mechanism of it, right? And what I would say is AI search is still fundamentally search, right? So there is still a search ranking. And by the way, to the best of my knowledge, which I think is pretty good, most of the search that's in AI search is still traditional search, right? There's an AI model in front of it, but you're still using your sort of traditional like, you know, text-based, like BM twenty-five or TFIDF or PageRank or what have you, search algorithms under the hood to locate pages in a search index. And that is kind of a fundamental component of all these AI search systems so far. I know people like xAI are doing something different, and I think that's really exciting, but just like that's not what's powering most of the products that people are using today. So traditional search ranking does still matter, and traditional SEO techniques do still work. Now we're-- it's tricky after that, right? Is like you're not just getting links for discovery, you're also consuming the content behind the links. How much of that are you giving away? Like what does it say? How well is the system able to interpret it? And so like the way we think about this for, for most, you know, most models, most platforms, and the details vary a little bit between like, you know, ChatGPT versus cloud search or something like that, right? Is like you're generating queries, right? You can generate one query, you can generate multiple if you're looking at like AI mode or some of the more recent like, you know, o3 search integrations that ChatGPT has. So you're generating keywords using an LLM, right? You're running searches in parallel or potentially serially if you're using a reasoning model. They're going out and retrieving results. And then there is sort of re-ranking that happens once you've got those raw search results. So the raw search results are again, traditional search, but then what you're doing after that is it's re-ranking them for relevance, and then it is only then starting to look at the actual content behind the pages. So this is where we see people, I think, get tripped up a lot in terms of small things that go wrong in terms of getting cited or getting mentioned inside ChatGPT is like- People have these pages that rank really well for search, and then when you look at the title of the page, like you don't look at the page content, you just sort of look at the metadata about the page. The metadata has been super optimized for human click-through, right? So think about like clickbait, think about things that are like, you know, like creating urgency, especially true in e-commerce, right, around sales and things like that, but they're not very informational about what actually is on the page. And then what we see is like, regardless of search ranking, often like a system like ChatGPT chooses not to use those, right? So it will re-rank them out of the consideration set, and then it'll just kinda go on to the next best result that has a more descriptive metadata saying, "Hey, this page actually has something that's relevant to your question on it." That sort of re-ranking step is critical. And, you know, since this is a technical podcast, I'll say like, you know, I'm not saying re-rank our model, I just mean there is a more intelligent step of sort of reordering what it looks at coming out of the traditional search index before you get to the part where it's actually consuming content and like summarizing and generating. That's, I think, like an important technical mechanism to understand. In terms of like the strategy of like how much to expose, I think it varies based on what you wanna do. For shopping, I would say typically they're gonna buy the product from somewhere. If you can get a link to your page and your page has a checkout on it, that's what you wanna achieve. Obviously, that's starting to change with like ChatGPT shopping and some of the more agentic shopping integrations we're seeing, um, in terms of being able to buy right within the AI experience. But I would still err on the side of disclosure, right? And I would especially err on the side of any more content talking more about like who the product is for and what it's good for and being descriptive about it. Um, a lot of shopping pages are like really highly visual, for example, so they're, they're tuned for people who are like looking visually at the webpage and being like, "I wanna buy that." And that still works because it's still super important. If you're like buying fashion, for example, right? That's just inherently a visual aesthetic experience. But even within like apparel, we see that like just being a little bit clearer about like, here's why, like here's who buys these type of leggings and for what can make a big difference in getting surfaced in ChatGPT, and then not only getting surfaced, but actually getting people to click through and ultimately purchase the product from that source. So our general stance is, is disclose more. **Alessio** [20:15] Yeah, I was gonna say that makes sense, and I think there's a lot of people that do things like, um, I need to buy a gift for my friend that loves to hike, that lives in LA, and- **Robert McCloy** [20:26] Uh-huh. **Alessio** [20:26] Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I'm curious if that's gonna be visible, if that's gonna be, again, what you guys wanna do later too, is just like help rewrite these things. My idea, and we haven't really talked about this even, uh, offline, do you get the query that the ChatGPT used to find your page when they come to your page? Like is there some sort of like way to understanding what brought them there? And then can you, in real time, rewrite the page to fit that query better? **Robert McCloy** [20:55] Yeah. I mean, people really want that to happen. It doesn't happen today, right? And I think there's a, there's a bunch of reasons why that's the case. The reason I think it probably won't be the case in the future is for privacy reasons. So I don't think that you will see, at least in the context of the way search is working today inside like a system like ChatGPT, I don't think you'll see that it's gonna pass like the prompt the user was using to the website, right, that it's getting content from. Because like if you think about how, how people use ChatGPT, people who get used to using ChatGPT start putting like all sorts of like protected health information and like crazy personal stuff into it, and that's one of the reasons it works so well. But obviously you don't wanna be passing that to, you know, websites you're finding through search on the internet. So right now the answer is like people really get almost no information about what led somebody from ChatGPT to their website. But I mean, that being said, I think if you look at where people are going to from ChatGPT to your website, you can get a lot of signal there, right? If people are coming to certain product categories, if they're coming to certain blog articles, you can get a sense of like, okay, what are people interested in who are using these tools? And especially if you have a good feeling for your-- if you have a good feel for your audience, I think it can be really powerful. We have customers, for example, who have like seen that people arrive on certain topics, like these are like developer infrastructure companies. They see that people arrive from ChatGPT on certain blog posts, um, about certain, you know, certain problems they're trying to solve, and they're like, "Clearly there are people trying to solve this problem on ChatGPT because this was surfaced and it came up. Let's write more content about that." And it's been a really effective strategy, right? They're just realizing that there is demand even though they're sort of indirectly detecting it because ChatGPT is sending people their way, and then they're just creating additional supply for that demand. **Swyx** [22:44] Yeah, I think Alessio was very struck by, uh, there was an example this week on Hacker News, I think, where, uh- **Robert McCloy** [22:49] Yeah. **Swyx** [22:50] ChatGPT hallucinated a feature that they didn't have, then they were like, "That's great, let's build it," because they could be used. **Robert McCloy** [22:55] Yeah, I, I saw that. I think I saw that one come through. Yeah. I mean, it does that all the time, right? I mean, I think that if you're, uh, if you're like a cursor enthusiast, I think many of us have had the experience, for example, of being like, "This thing keeps hallucinating methods in my code. I probably should just implement the methods so that, you know, I can stop having to like try to prompt engineer the model not to do that." And there's, there's sort of a similar vibe there, right? But you know, I think that's also an example of... My guess is, without having looked a ton at the actual example of that particular company, that's a case where doing some sort of context engineering, doing some engineering of like the actual content they had on their websites, on their pages might have improved that problem. Maybe it would've been a mistake to improve it because they might have like lost this funnel of users who were like, "Yeah, we're really interested if you have this feature." But one thing I'll say about startups, and we've done like a lot of reviews with like Y Combinator startups, for example, is like startups are really, really bad at describing what they do on their homepage. You know, the number of homepages where you're like, there's a really cool like parallax scroll animation and you're like, "What does this company actually do?" is super high. And I think that's tricky if you're trying to make like the best use of these tools. **Alessio** [24:05] Is there a meta game already of, like, this AI SEO algorithm? I remember back in the day there was like, oh, the Google Penguin algorithm update or, like, all these different things that they were doing. Is there something similar happening? ### AI SEO **Alessio** [24:19] Or there's kinda like the ground truth of the links, which are the search engines. But then on the re-ranking side, are people tracking how the different LLMs do the re-ranking and go through it, or that it's just a very native space still? **Robert McCloy** [24:33] Yeah, I mean, I think that people are definitely doing-- Uh, people are paying very close attention to the specifics of what the different AI platforms are doing in terms of, like, ranking and what kind of content they consume and, like, testing all sorts of experiments for what works best. And I'd say, like, our role in terms of what we do at Scrunch, right, is, like, we do a couple of different things, but one of the things we do is, like, we give people a feedback loop to understand how what they're doing is changing their performance. And so we've had some great case studies of people doing things like that that are, like, pretty in the weeds and getting good performance boosts out of it. In terms of, like, some of the more gray area SEO tactics, like, like that, you know, Penguin was addressing with Google back in the day, I mean, I think the reality is a lot of those things do work today. Like, I can't tell you they don't work. But I would say as like, you know, as a company, I wouldn't encourage anybody to do 'em 'cause I think it'll change eventually. And one thing, y-you mentioned this, but, like, one thing that's definitely true about all the AI search companies is, like, everything's super early. Twenty-four months ago, ChatGPT was like basically like, you know, ChatGPT was the original ChatGPT wrapper. It was just a wrapper around, uh, like GPT-3.5, and obviously it's gotten way more sophisticated over the past year or two, but none of these products have as much attention to detail or engineering put into them in terms of, like, moderation and abuse detection and, like, being defensive against the fact that the internet's a wild place as Google does, right? And Google's been around for twenty-five plus years, so no surprise there. A lot of things that work the way they work in AI search today, I would definitely say work that way sort of by accident. And so that's part of the, the challenge, I think, of being in the space, whether you're us or one of our customers that's trying to figure out how to make this work, is like everything changes super quickly. Of course, that's always true in AI. It's not just about, like, models getting better. It's really about, like, all of the underlying kinda glue that's connecting these models to search and to the internet, just like being pretty rudimentary and, like, getting more sophisticated over time. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's the way I think about it. **Alessio** [26:36] What's the name of the category in your mind? So there's AI SEO, AEO, people that come up with, then the GEO, generative engine optimization that a16z posted about. Do you think any of these are winners? Do you think we need something new? **Robert McCloy** [26:51] I'm terrible at naming things, so I'm the last person who should name the category. I would say people ask us, like, "Are we a GEO company?" And I say, "Yes," right? Because you can only fight so many battles. But again, I mean, I think if you think about... People have different definitions of what SEO means, but I think most common understanding, right, is it's basically about, like, showing up higher in search results. It's about showing up more frequently, and that is an important part of optimizing how your business and your products and services perform in these tools like ChatGPT. But again, I, I think that's only, like, the tip of the spear because it's not just replacing discovery, it's actually replacing how people actually consume content about your business and increasingly how they, like, interact with your business. It's not just, like, the entry point, it's more of the full journey of how somebody, like, engages with you or engages with your website. And so I think, like, SEO, AEO, GEO, that's generally been more focused on that, like, kinda entry point and the real prize is, again, I think more and more traditional web browsing is going away, like how do you optimize the complete customer experience for a world where, like, most people are doing most things in a tool like ChatGPT, um, instead of browsing around your website. So I don't have-- I don't know what a good category name for that is, but I think that's the one we're in. The way we think about it is, like, agent experience, right? So, like, by analogy to the customer experience, there's tons and tons of technology around making sure that customers have a good experience when they do come to your website and, like, go down funnels and, like, have a high NPS score and ultimately convert and, and are happy with the service they get. You know, I think it's gonna be really important to be that data-driven about how these, like, AI systems are interacting with your content, with your website, with your infrastructure, because ultimately they are serving your ultimate customer, serving the user, and you have to do a good job with the AI systems if you wanna do a good job for the user. So maybe agent experience is, is what I would call it. **Alessio** [28:47] Let's go forward to a future where, like Sam Altman says, ChatGPT is kinda like the all-encompassing personal assistant. I have all my memories, I have all my preferences. Do you see that playing a big part in kinda like how the re-ranking and the selection of these websites gets done? Is it used at all today? **Robert McCloy** [29:05] It definitely is, right? Like, so ChatGPT personalization, memories, just explicit preferences, if you set them up, do definitely affect the results you get. Now, again, obviously, they're, they're still using traditional search, so the search index itself is not necessarily personalized. But you can definitely tell ChatGPT, right, like, "I don't wanna read anything from these sources," and it will try to obey. That can affect both, like, what it's searching for and also which sources it prefers and ultimately how it presents information from those sources to you, right? I mean, I have the classic set of ChatGPT instructions in my ChatGPT config, which is like, "I'm a senior engineer," like, "Be concise," like, "Don't overexplain things," and, "Don't glaze me too much." And I certainly get different results using AI search with that profile than I do if I'm, like, in an incognito window with, like, the default consumer experience of ChatGPT. So I think, like, again, understanding your audience matters a lot. Ultimately, maybe where this ends up is, like, there's no single ChatGPT. Every single person kinda has their own, right, their own fully personalized experience. And I think if you're like a marketer who's like, "How do I measure this stuff?" That's kind of a nightmare, but I just think that's the reality we may be living in. So like, again, understanding like your audience, understanding your personas, like your ideal customer persona, thinking about how they wanna use these tools, like what they're trying to accomplish, and sort of modeling that out and measuring it is like a really important thing you should start doing. And that's something again that we, we try to help with in terms of what we're doing with monitoring at Scrunch. Not just like monitoring prompts, but trying to group them into like customer personas and actually monitoring the complete experience for somebody who, you know, is a senior engineer, is a product manager, is whatever ICP kinda makes sense for your business. **Swyx** [30:45] Speaking of clusters, I'm, I'm always curious to d-- to mine for data. You don't have to talk in specifics, but what are the major clusters? W- anything in, in there that surprises people? ### User Intent **Robert McCloy** [30:55] Clusters in terms of? **Swyx** [30:56] Prompts, usage, uh, your things your customers really care about. Uh, for example, shopping, big cluster, but if you don't use ChatGPT for shopping, you don't really care. Coding, big cluster. Again, if you're- **Robert McCloy** [31:09] Yeah **Swyx** [31:09] ... not a coder, you don't care. What else is like that? **Robert McCloy** [31:12] In terms of what we see as important, like there's, there's clusters of how people use LMS that are definitely a little, little bit less commercially relevant. So for example, there's, there are a lot of people who are very high volume users of ChatGPT who are like doing role-playing, for example, and then there's some other systems that have even more of that. And, um, if you're us, that's maybe a little bit less interesting. The biggest thing I would say is like if you expand from coding a little bit, what I would really say is it's about problem-solving. I don't know if you guys have seen this, but there was a, uh, study that's gone around. There's been like a couple versions of it f- around like what is basically the prompt intent of what people type into ChatGPT, right? Are they using it to find information? Is it navigational, which doesn't really make sense. Is it generative, like they're trying to create some text or create an artifact? Are they doing research? And, you know, they mined all this data from like, like panel data, like clickstream data of like a bunch of consumers who had opted into having their data collected, which is like how classically this stuff happens, um, in marketing research. One of the takeaways that the study had was like people use ChatGPT a lot for these sort of generative tasks, right? They're trying to accomplish something. They're not necessarily trying, they're not necessarily trying to do a search in the sense that somebody's, you know, trying to go to Google and search for a topic. And their takeaway was like maybe Google's safe. People are not necessarily using ChatGPT that much for these search tasks. So Google's still the king for search. You don't have to worry, like Google, you know, nobody's moving your cheese too much. But actually, what I would say is when you look deeper and, and like study how people use the tools, we've done some like qualitative studies and things like that, and then we have, you know, we have the same data everybody else has as well. People go to ChatGPT, especially in a business context, to solve problems. They're like, "I need help with something. I need to accomplish something. I need to like write this proposal. I need to come up with this financial model." Like for coders, it's real-- like it's really, really potent. You know, if you, if you've used AI coding tools, like they write the code for you, you get a solution, you can run the solution, like problem solved, you're done, right? So that's very tactile for most of us. But even outside of coding, I think people do a lot of that. And so what I would say, right, is like if you think about search, again, in a commercial context, it's usually like somebody being like, "How should I start to think about solving a problem? Like, how should I go, like find options I can consider to solve this problem I have," right? How can I like, use Excel to build my financial model? How can I write a proposal that'll look good to my boss? You know, these are like search intent informational queries. In ChatGPT, people, people don't really do that. People just say, "Solve the problem for me." What I think is really interesting about that is like it's actually the highest intent, like it's the most valuable thing you could be doing, 'cause you're going from being like, "I think I need to solve this problem, and maybe I will," to being like, "I'm actually in the middle of trying to solve it inside, you know, ChatGPT or Cursor or what have you," right? Depending on what you're doing. Um, so I'd say like that's kind of the, the biggest cluster if you wanna get a little bit more abstract. One specific example that takes people a little bit by surprise is like there are a huge number of people doing like B2B software bake-offs in ChatGPT. You know, if you're at a big company and your boss is like, "Hey, we need to buy something to solve this problem," but like procurement makes us get three examples, like we can't just go buy something. We have to like, you know, like run a bake-off. People are outsourcing a lot of that type of work to ChatGPT, and particularly to deep research, but even just with regular search, and it's really good at it, to be honest, right? Like it's, it's really good at being like, "Here's your comparison table of like different CRM systems," or something like that. **Swyx** [34:39] Yeah, make the checkboxes focus on what I'm looking for, not what they're selling, you know? **Robert McCloy** [34:43] Right. Right. And so for, for B2B software companies- **Swyx** [34:47] Yeah **Robert McCloy** [34:47] ... you can imagine. **Swyx** [34:48] As a quick note, how do you know? Because you don't directly see the traffic, but like how, how do you know? **Robert McCloy** [34:54] Yeah. So there's two parts to it, right? So there is, uh, looking at panel data, which I think is what everybody who's publishing these studies basically is doing. And I, in previous lives, worked in ad tech, so to the extent the web is maybe less pleasing of a place to be, like we're all looking for the guy who did this, it was, it was me. Um- You know, and we used just a ton of panel data in that pursuit to do like consumer modeling and stuff like that. So I mean, that's sort of the, the secret of all of these studies of like what people are doing on the internet, is they generally come from like clickstream panel data, which is valuable, but it also can be misleading because the type of people who are in panels isn't necessarily representative of the whole population. And specifically, it's not necessarily representative of people who are doing like high value things like being, you know, staff software engineers at Stripe or something like that. So the other thing we've done is we've just done sort of qualitative research. Like we've just, you know, like followed people home, watched them use products. Um- **Swyx** [35:50] Wow **Robert McCloy** [35:50] ... asked them, you know, asked the like post-survey follow-ups where somebody's been like, "I found you through ChatGPT," and we've been like, "What were you doing when you found us?" Things of that nature. And so that's where a lot of those B2B software examples come from. **Swyx** [36:02] Just to double click on the B2B software thing. Uh, I'm sure people ask you this, but I don't think you've covered it yet. What if I try a prompt injection inside of my, you know, featureless page? ### Optimization **Robert McCloy** [36:11] Yeah. I mean, it, it often works right now, um, right? Like, I don't, I, I don't think this is a secret. **Swyx** [36:17] Yeah. So everyone should do it. **Robert McCloy** [36:20] I think it, it works until it stops working, right? And I would say, like, there's not a lot of stories of people getting banned for like ChatGPT search so far, but it's coming, right? So I would always say- **Swyx** [36:32] Yeah, so there's a window, right? **Robert McCloy** [36:35] ... caution. **Swyx** [36:35] Uh, I, I don't know. **Robert McCloy** [36:35] Yeah. **Swyx** [36:36] Do you get banned? I mean, you're, you're just trying things. **Robert McCloy** [36:40] I, I think, you know, a-again, like talking my own book, what I would say is as things get more sophisticated, like black hat stuff tends to get kinda pushed out and penalized, and there's negative consequences to doing it. And then there's some gray hat stuff which like typically, you know, people do and don't talk about. Really what I would say, though, about most AI search things in terms of like just optimizing how you show up in these answers if you're a business is like, I think we're actually in one of these rare windows of time where it's positive sum all the way around. And what I mean by that is like when you look at improving how you show up in like ChatGPT answers, most of the time the problem is not that you like were insufficiently glazing yourself in your product description page. A lot of the time the problem is like you're just not being very descriptive about your product in general on your product description page. And so like if you provide more information, more context, it helps the model do a better job. It's gonna have a more accurate comparison table. It's gonna guide the user to a better solution. And so like assuming you do a good job providing that context, like you're gonna be happy, the user's gonna be happy, and ultimately the platform provider's gonna be happy. I think at Google and SEO, things often feel sort of like pretty zero sum. You know, everything's competitive and like everybody's looking for a trick. There's so much low-hanging fruit in this space that I would just say like, you know, before you go to that, I would focus on how do you actually ser-- uh, focus on serving the user, right? Serving the user through the AI platform they're using. And just like clear writing, good structured content, adding lots of helpful examples and facts and FAQs makes a huge difference. But if you wanna prompt inject ChatGPT through search, I-- it's, it's definitely achievable. And again, I think like these systems are like one-hundredth of the sophistication they'll eventually be. Again, not even talking about the LMS, just talking about sorta like the glue code, right, between like the search and webpages and, and AI. **Swyx** [38:32] And when you say tweaking the content, do you still mean doing that in the traditional formats? Or what about things like, you know, LMS.txt or these like AI native ways to alternatively serve content? **Robert McCloy** [38:45] ChatGPT today, right, is using your existing webpages, so it's using HTML you're serving off your web server. I know that there's debate about this, but I'd say the evidence is like ChatGPT is not indexing and it's not retrieving content from LMS.txt by default. And I think a lot of people who are, are a little bit further removed from the aud-- like the original audience, like the fast AI guys for LMS.txt sort of like have mistaken what it's for. It's great for documentation. Like it's great if you've actually already written a ton of prose and you're like, "How do I load this into my contacts window more efficiently?" As a discoverability tool, I would say it's not moving the needle for most people yet, but these things can always change, right? Like- **Swyx** [39:22] Yeah **Robert McCloy** [39:22] ... everything's changing day by day. **Swyx** [39:24] Anything else that you think people think it's good, but it actually doesn't make a difference? What, what else would you put in that list? **Robert McCloy** [39:30] Oh, man. Embeddings. You know, I think a lot of people are very focused on, uh, especially in some of like the SEO optimization community, there's a lot of focus on like understanding embeddings and similarity search and things like that with the idea that, again, like maybe the search technology is changing. And I think obviously embeddings are, are very, very useful in general. But I think as a tool to understand how these AI platforms are consuming your content, embeddings aren't that relevant. You're better off focusing on like just, again, having a good structured set of content that makes sense like to a human, um, with like clean HTML and things like that. Trying to like super optimize, like, you know, topic similarity and things like that, I don't think makes much of a difference and may harm things in some cases. **Swyx** [40:14] I just wanna open up the space to any other practices you see that may be super effective or super ineffective that- **Robert McCloy** [40:21] Uh-huh **Swyx** [40:22] ... people have got into their heads that, "Oh, we gotta do this for, for our GEO," but like it doesn't matter. **Robert McCloy** [40:27] I mean, I feel like we've covered quite a bit of it. I would just, you know, again, I would say, like, clear writing matters a ton. Um, and then this is... I guess we haven't said this on the, on the pod yet, so, uh, this is one thing definitely people should take away, which is like ChatGPT doesn't execute JavaScript. Most of the AI search indexers and retrievers don't execute JavaScript. So if your content is not rendered on the server side, um- **Swyx** [40:51] Yeah **Robert McCloy** [40:51] ... it's typically not gonna be available, right? And we see that it trips people up all the time. And I would just say, like I'm perhaps like an old-fashioned like- ... SSG enthusiast. Um, right? But, uh, even if you're using like Next.js and things like that, we've seen lots of examples with customers where, you know, they've got like a use effect in some page somewhere, and it breaks- **Swyx** [41:12] Yeah **Robert McCloy** [41:12] ... server-side rendering, and then all of a sudden they're like, "None of this content's available." **Swyx** [41:16] Turn JavaScript off. Check your page. If it looks good, you know you're fine. If it's not, fix it. Uh, every developer here knows how to do that. Uh, that, I think that's really helpful. Um- **Robert McCloy** [41:26] Yeah. **Swyx** [41:26] I think the o- the one for me is I, I, I have been involved with a company that, like, put a lot of effort into this programmatic SEO, but like augmented by AI. So you get into this really terrible, horrible situation where you're generating a whole bunch of pages for you using LMS in order to be read by LMS in order to rank higher. **Robert McCloy** [41:47] Right. The infinite chain. Um- **Swyx** [41:49] Maybe it works, and if it works, like, okay, there's a number where it makes sense. I don't know. **Robert McCloy** [41:54] I, I think there's good, bad versions, like everything, right? So what I would say is, first off, like it's just a fact of life that a lot of content, especially on marketing websites, is being produced using AI. Like, that's just, like, it's already so prevalent. You know, when you get to pr-- like scaled programmatic SEO, which is a little bit more controversial- I think that it can be super helpful in some cases if it's done well. And really what I say done well, what I mean is, like, if it's bringing some kind of, like, insight that actually is particular to you and your company and what you do, and making it easier to consume for AI, right? Or for search in general. So if you're just taking kinda, like, content off the public web that's there already, that's already, like, super well represented in AI, and you're, like, remixing it and, like, maybe, maybe they'll cite my page instead of this other page. I mean, it works sometimes, but I wouldn't say it's a durable strategy. We have customers who are doing things where, like, they take, for example, like, support tickets that are coming, you know, they're, they're looking at their support tickets, and they're doing programmatic SEO generation of, like, how-tos from support tickets and putting that on their website. And number one, it's super helpful for users. It's helpful for the support team 'cause they get fewer support questions, and that content is, like, the almost the exact ideal content you could give to an LLM, right? Because people are going to ChatGPT like, "How do I solve this problem?" And it's like, "Here you go." I think it can be done well, and it can be really helpful in those cases. I think there's a lot of things that work right now in terms of just, like, using AI to remix content and get more scale, but, like, everybody has access to these tools, right? So eventually, you know, it's no longer. ### Deep Research **Alessio** [43:21] I think we just had a couple more things. So do you have any sense on difference between ChatGPT search versus Deep Research and how they leverage search, read content? Is it just using the same tool, or do you see, uh, very different results? **Robert McCloy** [43:36] Yeah. I mean, the ingestion pipeline is, is similar, right? So, you know, all the practices I mentioned, like Deep Research also doesn't read JavaScript, right? Um, it, it's just quantity, right? It's doing more searches, and it follows up, um... The thing that makes Deep Research really powerful-- So, like, maybe there's a... it's good to have a taxonomy. There's, like, regular search, which is, like, it does one search, it gives you the results, it re-ranks them, it summarizes them, you get an answer. There's multi search, which we're starting to see more in, like, regular ChatGPT 4 and also in AI mode, where it just does a bunch of searches simultaneously. And then Deep Research, what's different about it is that it's sequentially following up with a reasoning model to, like, be like, "Hmm, these sources didn't answer the question. Let me try something else." And that's really the game changer about, like, how, how deep Deep Search works. I think from an optimization perspective, there's not necessarily a ton of fundamental differences. But what I would say is, like, sometimes more content isn't better, and that's true for me as a user using Deep Search. Like, I definitely have experiences where I'm like, Deep Research gives me results that are inferior to just, just using regular ChatGPT search because it's ingesting more content, but the content isn't necessarily, like, contributing to the understanding I'm looking for. And then as a business who's publishing content that's being consumed by this thing, it's like, how consistent is your content, right? Do you have outdated things? Like, is it getting information that contributes to, like, the user being helped and having a helpful understanding of what you do, or is there, like, outdated and conflicting stuff? And, like, classic example on that would be, like, pricing. Um, we see cases all the time where, like, people have tons of pages on their site that mention pricing, and some of them are out of date. And, like, the more content ChatGPT is consuming off of your website, the more likely it is to get conflicting answers, and sometimes people end up with the wrong prices. So I'd say that's something to be mindful of, but I don't think it changes the game a ton in terms of your strategy as a business. **Swyx** [45:34] One thing I might think about, just trying to think this through, I've never thought about this problem, but, like, if I were trying to optimize, you know, my websites for Deep Research, I would tell them what to search next. So you, you really need that, like, next link or, like, here's, like, related links, and you obviously wanna make it favorable to yourself. I don't know. **Robert McCloy** [45:52] You can certainly do that, and you see that that works to some extent. Like, it is obviously, because it's serialized, it's influenced by the previous results. But what I would also say in that situation is, like, why not just include the content in the first place, right? Rather than having it do a follow-up. **Swyx** [46:06] Well, y- um, you just can't include everything, right? Like, maybe there's a-- there's, there's different branches you could take, so the branching factor is high. **Robert McCloy** [46:13] For sure. There's limits on context window and things like that. So I mean, I think it is, I think it is reasonable. But what I would also say is, like, actually, that's a perfect case for something like programmatic SEO, where you might also benefit from saying, like, "Let's have more focused pages that describe, like, a complete solution rather than, you know, or the complete piece of information for, like, some particular version of a query or version of a persona, rather than sort of it being choose your own adventure." And I think, like, that's where having more technical sophistication in how you manage content and, like, what you show maybe to AI versus, like, to Google or to regular people can be interesting. And so, you know, we have some folks doing that. **Swyx** [46:50] Some websites have, um, infinite scroll. I guess if you're not rendering JavaScript, that doesn't matter. But, like, I... Yeah, I mean, this is this whole, whole thing about LMS.txt. Like, you just, just cat everything into one giant file. Uh, I mean, I, I can do that, it's just... Yeah, it actually matters. **Robert McCloy** [47:05] Yeah. I mean, and, like, there's tons of, like, LMS.full.txts that are, you know, w-well- **Swyx** [47:10] Yes **Robert McCloy** [47:10] ... over the context window of common models. So you're like, "Is this helping? I don't know." Again, to me, I'm like, for some of these things, search works pretty well. Like, regular search over your regular website works pretty well and naturally sort of solves that chunk size problem. But you do need to have content on your website that's, like, that's helpful and targeted to the questions people are trying to ask. ### Case Studies **Alessio** [47:30] Awesome. Um, any case studies on companies that are doing this amazingly well that people should learn from? Or are people still keeping it under wraps? **Robert McCloy** [47:40] We definitely have case studies, and I think the ones that are most interesting to me personally, again, are the ones where we're seeing people who are not just getting more traffic, right? Like, traffic is kinda like the first approximation everybody uses in SEO and, and then also in this AI search phase. But people who are actually getting more conversions, more actual business. And so, like, two that I would mention, like, two really great customers who are both in kind of the dev infrastructure space. One is Clerk, you know, the user authentication company. And they have like, they have great docs in general, like they're well set up to succeed in AI because of that. But they've seen a huge lift in AI traffic from sort of like targeted optimizations and like looking at the type of content that AI wants to use and generating more of it. But they've actually seen an even bigger uplift in conversions coming from ChatGPT. So I think the stat is like they've seen like a six X growth in ChatGPT traffic, more traffic from maybe ChatGPT, Perplexity, like the common set, but they've seen a nine X lift in conversions. And again, I think that goes back to like when people are looking... like if people are asking like, you know, uh, how do I implement enterprise SSO in my app, for example, right? It's because they actually have that problem, like they're looking for a solution and they're ready to implement, right? So the, the closer you can get them to actually being able to like solve a problem, the higher propensity they have to convert, and that's like the dream, um, in my opinion. **Alessio** [48:52] And are you guys helping with that? Just, you know, for people, you-- they sign up-- Clerk signs up for Scrunch. You guys kinda do look at how it performs right now. And then are you helping them generate this content? Like, how much of it do they do on their own? **Robert McCloy** [49:09] I think where we're at right now is like we're the, we're the feedback and experimentation system. So we-- you know, I can't take credit, basically is what I'm saying. The team at Clerk is great and has been really thoughtful about like the types of content they need to create. They know their audience really well, right? They're developers, they have a Discord, they're super engaged with, with the people who actually use Clerk every day. So we're providing, I, I think the supporting role of like helping them understand what's working and double down on it. We're not like a content generation company, right? We don't know their business as well as they do. They can do a better job generating content. We are, I think, working on helping them put that process more on rails, you know, so creating more structure, being able to run multiple experiments at a time, and ultimately helping them try to figure out like how to deliver more tactically of that value to the AI, uh, platforms, and that's where maybe some of these other things, like we didn't get into it, but you know, obviously MCTs, NL Web, everybody is wondering what the tactical mechanism is gonna be for getting this content into these AI platforms if it's not just traditional AI search and the future is. Um, so starting to do more work there, which I'd also put under that sort of like agent experience bucket. But they're the star of the show, and I'd say that's true for all of our customers. So, you know, we are a solution people can use to solve this problem. We're not an agency that comes in and solves it directly. But we do have... I'll, I'll give a plug here. We do have tons of really great agency customers, so if you're looking for an agency to do it for you, we can definitely steer you in the right direction. **Swyx** [50:36] And can you give a, a range of like, uh, ju-just literally, okay, like, you know, I'm a company, I wanna improve my rankings or optimization. How long and what kind of uplift is typical? Like just, just to give an idea of what's on the table for, for these, like, you know. **Robert McCloy** [50:51] I mean, I, I think it varies a little bit by vertical. Like dev tools- **Swyx** [50:55] Yeah **Robert McCloy** [50:55] ... is, is, is a very good fit for AI, so I'm not gonna promise that everybody's gonna see a six X uplift in traffic. But there's a lot of low-hanging fruit. So I would say we typically see people get double digits improvements in traffic within a month or two if they, you know, if they are actively working to improve- **Swyx** [51:11] Yeah **Robert McCloy** [51:11] ... right? Updating their website, publishing content. Some folks are more in wait and see mode and, you know, that makes sense for some businesses, but if you're actively working, it's achievable. **Swyx** [51:20] Those things on like higher conversion, but also just, just raw higher traffic is not something that, that I was thinking about or watching, but it's really like it's, it's starting to flip for some people where like it's actually more than normal Google. Um- **Robert McCloy** [51:32] Yeah **Swyx** [51:32] ... and then like, okay, like your, well, your budget has to shift over basically. **Robert McCloy** [51:36] Yeah. **Swyx** [51:37] Just a last wrapper, two, two last wrap- wrapper questions. Uh, w- uh, quick one is, which is, um, do you have a sense of like market share of, let's say, ChatGPT versus Google AI Overviews? I assume like Claude is a lot smaller. ### Market Share **Swyx** [51:49] What is the market share? What, what is, what are the rankings in your mind of like what people care about? **Robert McCloy** [51:54] ChatGPT, I would say by far in a way is the thing that people think about as being an AI platform- **Swyx** [52:00] Yeah **Robert McCloy** [52:00] ... that has the strongest consumer presence and the most durable relationship with consumers, right? So everything else is kind of a distant second. Now, AI Overviews in AI mode, which is brand new, so I don't have great stats on that, obviously are like they're putting, being put right in front of your face. **Swyx** [52:15] Yeah. **Robert McCloy** [52:15] So huge, huge traffic. And then meta AI, right, like Sleeper- **Swyx** [52:19] Yeah **Robert McCloy** [52:19] ... has published stats on, you know, having seven hundred million, I'm sure more than that now, active users because they're, you know... if you do an Instagram search, you end up in meta AI. **Swyx** [52:28] You haven't mentioned Perplexity, which I think it, think, think is interesting. **Robert McCloy** [52:31] Yeah. Yeah. Perplexity is pretty big. So I would actually say that like Perplexity is- **Swyx** [52:37] Oh **Robert McCloy** [52:37] ... the second biggest AI native search platform after ChatGPT. **Swyx** [52:40] Wow! **Robert McCloy** [52:40] And it's got-- I think more importantly, it's got like people who are really passionate about using it. You know what I mean? I would say that like people who are really into Perplexity are probably more into it than many of the other options, you know, but it is, it is smaller, right, in terms of raw volume. I think what's actually really interesting, and I didn't pull, like you guys could pull this up the same as I can, but if you go look at like App Store rankings, for example, I think what's actually more interesting than just looking at like, you know, how like is ChatGPT the number one app in the App Store in the category, which mostly has been, right? What's actually interesting is look at the volatility of it, and if you look, like go look back at DeepSeek, look at when Grok first launched a mobile app, things like that, and you can look at similar, you can look at similar data from like Similarweb, for example. ChatGPT has pretty consistently been very high traffic. Obviously, the growth has been insane, but in terms of like relative market share, it's been consistently one of the best. And in contrast, like we've seen more like peaks and troughs with things like Gemini and DeepSeek and, and Grok and things like that. So they may well become firmly established, but nobody has this sort of like durable relationship with tons of people like ChatGPT does in the space so far. And Perplexity, though, if you look at it again, like in absolute terms it's lower, but if you look at the consistency of people using it over time, it's really, really strong. So I would say like, especially if you are in a category that has an affinity for Perplexity, if you're in tech, if you're in maybe some segments of finance, things like that- **Alessio** [54:07] Early adopters, yeah **Robert McCloy** [54:08] ... you need to pay attention to it. And same thing for Claude, right? Like Claude famously, like way fewer users, like revenue, actually different story in terms of like being compared to OpenAI, but like people who use Po- Claude are very, very passionate about it for the most part. That's an interesting thing to think about from a strategy perspective. And I will say I don't think it's, you know, ChatGPT is durable, but not infinitely so. Like if you look at the reaction to like GlazeGate, the reason people I think stick with it is because they actually just really like the product, right? Which is sometimes under appreciated, I think, in tech, right? We always talk about like platform wars and politics and stuff like that, but like people just really like it. But when people feel maybe like a little bit betrayed, like the product's going in the wrong direction, there's a lot of pushback. And so it's gonna be an interesting time to be alive over the next couple years, as it has been so far. But I, I think it's here to stay. ### Wrap-Up **Alessio** [54:58] Awesome, Robert. This was great. Anything else we missed or any call to action for people? Are you hiring? Are you obviously wanna ... More people should use it, uh, that's kinda, uh, obvious. **Robert McCloy** [55:10] Yeah. I mean, I, I would say, I think this is the future like of the web, right? Like, the future of the web is like you need to be sort of AI compatible and understand how the things you're publishing shows up in these systems. And so just like, as somebody who's been a web enthusiast for thirty years, 'cause I'm old, uh, don't get caught up in snake oil and investigate what works and like do things that make sense and, you know, don't ignore it either. I would also just say like for, especially for the Latent Space audience is like, we are definitely hiring, and I think a lot of what we're doing, right, is we're doing research into exactly what I just said, which is like understanding how AI and the web kind of interoperate in the future and like what the future of the web should look like if you're a business who's trying to be in front of customers. And so if you're a type of person who's interested in helping us figure that out, like we are definitely hiring. Uh, we have a lot of open roles, and we would love to, love to talk to you. **Alessio** [56:06] Awesome. Thank you, Robert. **Robert McCloy** [56:08] Thank you so much. See you guys. --- This library is powered by PodHood (https://podhood.com), the podcast website platform.