Live Reaction: What Signals Help AI Trust & Recommend Your Company? [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 154]

This transcript has been generated by AI and not checked for accuracy. 

[01:00:00:00 - 01:00:05:15]

Stephanie Baiocchi

That experience can lose a customer before you even know you've lost them, before you even know you have anything to lose.

[01:00:05:15 - 01:00:09:12]

Stephanie Baiocchi

And not necessarily to a competitor with a better product than you or better reviews,

[01:00:09:12 - 01:00:11:02]

Stephanie Baiocchi

just someone who had their pricing accessible,

[01:00:11:02 - 01:00:12:07]

(Music)

[01:00:13:07 - 01:00:53:22]

Stephanie Baiocchi

You're listening to the Endless Customers podcast, brought to you by the team at Impact. Endless Customers is the proven system to become the most known and trusted brand in your market. If you want to learn the principles of Endless Customers and how you can implement them in your business, pick up a copy of Endless Customers, a national bestseller, wherever books are sold. Ready to start implementing Endless Customers in your business? Talk to Impact about how our coaching program can help you implement Endless Customers to success. If you want to experience Endless Customers in person, don't miss our upcoming event, Endless Customers Live in Hartford, Connecticut, October 5th through the 7th, 2026. Registration is now open. Now, onto the show. Here's your

[01:00:53:22 - 01:03:11:12]

Stephanie Baiocchi

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Endless Customers podcast. It's a special day because I'm here. I'm Stephanie Biocchi, the director of membership and events here at Impact. And I guess Bob Ruffalo gets to take a vacation once in a while. So I'm here to try something new and hopefully y'all like it. Let us know. Send us your feedback. Maybe we'll do more of it. See, we talk a lot on this show about becoming the most known and trusted brand in your market. That's Endless Customers. That's always been the mission. But there's been a shift in things, right? A lot has changed in the past few months even when it comes to AI and search. And Mark has laid out a lot of this at Endless Customers Live, our event in Chicago that we just had this past April. Also shameless plug. The event is coming back to Hartford, Connecticut, October 5th through the 7th. We're going to be doing even more deep dive workshops and even more content about AI like this. So I hope you'll join us. But it's not just your buyers who need to find and trust you anymore. Yes, you need to be the most known and trusted brand in your market, but also to the AI that they're asking about you before they ever find you. They're asking about their problems and questions. So today on the show, we're going to do things a little bit differently. I'm going to watch Marcus Sheridan, author of Endless Customers session from Endless Customers Live back in April. And I'm going to react to it live. The session was called 13 Trust Signals Reshaping Human and AI Visibility in 2026 and Beyond. And every business leader listening, every marketer, every content manager needs to be in the know on this. What Marcus is about to describe is really the shift from just SEO and keywords to GEO or AEO, that answer engine generative engine optimization. So while SEO was about ranking on a page full of blue links where someone might command click all the links and do all their research, GEO is about being the answer AI gives when someone asks a question and not just being the answer, but being cited as the answer. And the signals there are different. We've been helping clients navigate this with Endless Customers with the system, with their content. And what I'm about to share with you is what solid GEO actually requires in practice. And we're going to take a look at what Marcus has to say, and then I'll give you a few of my reactions. So here we go.

[01:03:11:12 - 01:03:29:14]

Marcus Sheridan

We're going to have, we're going to attempt to have a master class on what we might call Trust Signals. Trust signals. What is a trust signal? Well, that's what AI uses to decide whether or not they want to recommend you. And as we have well established at this point,

[01:03:30:23 - 01:03:45:07]

Marcus Sheridan

Trust Signals and AI recommendations are going to be a massive, massive, they're going to have a massive impact on you moving forward. And Trust Signals is any piece of content that has ever been produced about you,

[01:03:46:08 - 01:03:57:21]

Marcus Sheridan

by you, or by someone else about you. So every single review that's on the line, positive, negative, that's a trust signal that AI is going to use to say, "I recommend you or I reject you."

[01:03:59:01 - 01:04:53:16]

Marcus Sheridan

Every single video you produce, as we just discussed, with that multi-modality component of AI, is going to be a trust signal. It's all going to be a signal. And each signal, the brand is going to go up or the brand is going to go down. And that's just where we're going to be. So in this talk, what we're going to try to do in 45 minutes, and we might have a little bit of time at the end, I don't know yet, is we're going to try to give you a sense for how you can fix some of these signals right now. Because some of these signals are quick fixes. Some of them take a lot more time. And so we're going to try to look at both. But let's just start again from the point of, "AI's not recommending us, we're going to be in trouble." And your goal is to become the most known and trusted brand in your market, by humans and by AI. So this session is really about, "Okay, we want AI to trust us, like what exactly do we have to do?" So let's dive into the trust signals that matter.

[01:04:55:12 - 01:05:34:21]

Stephanie Baiocchi

All right. So before we actually dive into the trust signals, I want to note a couple of things that Mark has said here. First of all, he mentioned videos. And for a long time, videos could not be watched by AI. We were relying solely on transcripts, descriptions, and those things still absolutely matter on your YouTube channel, on your website, in your schema markup. But there are a lot of tools now, especially through Google, that can actually process the content of a video. And so it's becoming more and more common for video content to be included in these signals. And just, yeah, don't forget about video, because AI is reading and watching all of it and making a judgment. And, you know, we've been building toward this with all of our content,

[01:05:35:23 - 01:05:42:10]

Stephanie Baiocchi

but that's where we're at right now. All right. So let's go on to clip two. We're going to talk about a couple of the first trust signals.

[01:05:42:10 - 01:05:43:23]

Marcus Sheridan

You can take a photo of this,

[01:05:43:23 - 01:05:52:03]

Marcus Sheridan

but I'm just going to tell you, a lot of it's going to look nerdy, and a lot of it's going to feel technical. Some of it is technical. For example,

[01:05:53:11 - 01:06:10:00]

Marcus Sheridan

a trust signal that affects how AI sees you is what's called NAT. NAT. Raise your hand if you know what NAT is in the marketing world. Now, some of you are saying, "I wish I could take a NAT right about now, so I could not hear this guy yelling at me for the next 45 minutes."

[01:06:10:00 - 01:06:16:23]

Marcus Sheridan

Well, NAT means name, address, and phone number. And here's the issue.

[01:06:16:23 - 01:07:04:14]

Marcus Sheridan

If AI sees that you have multiple versions of your NAT across the internet, AI says, "I'm not sure if I can trust you." Now, some of you might say, "Well, that shouldn't be a problem." No, no. We've run tests on this, and we've seen time and time again that almost all businesses have variants in your NAT across the board. And so let's say you're on six different review platforms. If you're on six different review platforms, and on some of them you've got a semicolon, on some of them you've got an ink, and on another you've got an LLC, and on one you've got this one phone number, on this other you've got this other phone number, you're going to have a NAT discrepancy. NAT discrepancy means you get dinged, you get dinged, and that's a strike against you.

[01:07:06:19 - 01:07:56:10]

Stephanie Baiocchi

Oh, man, Marcus. I do have a NAT discrepancy. I would love to take a NAT, but instead what I would do if I were you is audit your NAT. You can do this in like 30 minutes, and if your business info is inconsistent across the web, like Marcus said, even with little things, AI can penalize you for it. So if you're listening, run a NAT audit this week. Next, Marcus is going to walk through some of the rest of the signals that matter most. I'm going to pause during a couple of key moments where I've seen people's understanding of these kind of trip sometimes, and we'll dig in a little bit deeper. So the first one's going to be about pricing transparency. We all know if you've listened to this podcast before, pricing transparency is so, so, so important. It's just table stakes at this point. AI is going to stop recommending companies that don't address pricing online, full stop. So let's take a look at this clip.

[01:07:56:10 - 01:09:19:21]

Marcus Sheridan

are basically two trust signals that seem to matter to tools like ChatTBT or platforms like ChatTBT more than any other. First major trust signal is reviews. We're going to look at reviews, but it's becoming more, not less important in terms of your ability to get that recommended with a tool like ChatTBT. But what's happening, and we're definitively seeing this, is pricing has become one of the most essential trust signals in the world today. And it also is elevating. And it's getting to the point where if you're not willing to address pricing online, and I think you can absolutely take this to the bank, within the next year or so, AI will just flat out stop recommending your company. It's not going to recommend your company if you don't address this as a whole. And here's the reason why. AI clearly understands how P-O'd you get as a human being when you go on a site and you're looking for cost and price information and you cannot find it. It doesn't care all the reasons why you might say in your business you can't do this. All it knows is your customer gets really P-O'd really fast. Now, you've heard about the perfect pricing page before. That's in endless customers. And this is the ultimate way to make sure if you're going to build a pricing page, which everyone in here should, be a B2B, service product, local, national, big, small, whatever you are,

[01:09:21:00 - 01:09:56:18]

Marcus Sheridan

we want to make sure that we're following the perfect pricing page as much as possible. The majority of you in here could hit at least 90% of these on your site. I know, Andrea, you've got 16 out of 16 of these on your site right now, and I know there's some of you that have 16 out of 16. But this is what you want to create if you would add to source you and recommend you from a pricing page perspective. You should have a perfect pricing page for every major service or product you offer. Since you have three major services, you have three perfect pricing pages, one for each. Okay, that's essential. I'm not

[01:09:56:18 - 01:10:43:11]

Stephanie Baiocchi

All right, let's dig into this for a second. So, perfect pricing page, that is a downloadable piece that we have on Impact Site. You can check it out. It's in the companion guide for the book, and I'm sure we can link to it in the description of the podcast. But you have got to tackle all of those things. We see so many companies sometimes with a pricing page just publish something so they can check the box. They can say, "We have pricing on our website." That's not enough. You have to educate people about pricing. The architecture of the page matters. Having FAQs matter. Having the proper schema matters. This is how we get AI to trust this information and not just buyers. So, one of our clients, Honest Fix, is a great example. They have historical pricing trends, FAQs. Let's see if we can actually pull up their site and take a look.

[01:10:43:11 - 01:11:26:14]

Stephanie Baiocchi

right. So, this is Honest Fix, one of our clients. And you can see that on their pricing page, they have an overview. They have an estimator and payment options. And this is amazing because their overview has "understand" as the first word, which is amazing. They're teaching you. You can see repair pricing and installation pricing and get that for your estimate. But they also have historical pricing information, why costs have gone up. They have what affects the price, what you can expect to pay, actual numbers, which is huge. I mean, AI just eats this stuff up. Plus, then you have a nice summary here. You have some bullet points. So, it's all formatted to be really digestible by people and AI. And then, of course, you have the FAQs. So, they did a fantastic job with this page. They have

[01:11:29:01 - 01:11:35:15]

Stephanie Baiocchi

the date it was last updated. They have pricing ranges to compare options. They really nailed it with this page.

[01:11:35:15 - 01:11:49:11]

Stephanie Baiocchi

All right. The pricing conversation gets a lot more interesting in this next clip. We're going to jump ahead a bit. Marcus shows you something that Google is already doing that should get every business leader's attention when it comes to pricing transparency. Let's take a look.

[01:11:49:11 - 01:12:36:00]

Marcus Sheridan

You've heard me talk about this stat before. If you've read the book, you've heard it. 75% of all buyers now say they prefer to have a seller free sales experience. Well, this is true, but Google also knows this. ChatT knows this. All the AI knows this, and it's leading to certain things. Now, one of the things we talk about in those customers is how this lends itself to what's called self-service. In other words, creating tools that allow someone to get an answer or take an action on your website that previously they haven't done by talking with a human, but instead now they can use the tool to have an interactive experience and then take the action or get the answer. So that's what self-service does. You've heard about it, but here's the thing. This is what's changing. Self-pricing tools are starting to become required

[01:12:37:03 - 01:15:01:07]

Marcus Sheridan

by search engines and AI. Not just pricing information. This is where it gets really interesting. This is a mega trend. So right now, if anybody goes online within the home improvement space, and I know some of you, many of you are not in home improvement, but lots of things from a trend perspective start in home improvement, and then they work their way out to the rest of B2C, and then they work their way out to the rest of B2B. So we see this all the time, historically speaking. So right now, if somebody goes online and searches, you can do this on your phone, Ruford near me, Remobbler near me, any home service near me. Do it on your phone, and you're going to see something that appears that has never appeared in the history of Google. Does everybody see it? What's the phrase? Online estimate. So for the first time, and this all happened really within the last 60-ish days, for the first time, Google is saying, "Hey, we want to reward any company that is showing an online estimate." They're trying to highlight this. Now, if you click on this, what happens is they change the search. So if I had done, like, "New roof near me," click on it, "Online estimate," and it's going to show a search result for "Online estimates, new roof near me." Then what they're showing is a sponsored and then organic results. But on the sponsored results, look what they're showing, they're bringing out, they're actually highlighting more, is the free online estimator tool. Okay. So why is this such a big deal? Google is essentially saying, and they've always said this, "Our job is to give you the best, most specific relevant answer to your question as quickly as possible." They know that's what you want. They know, oftentimes, one of the first things you're trying to address, as we've said a lot of times, is the fundamental question, roughly, "How much is this going to cost?" Online estimators do exactly that. So they're now rewarding the companies that have it. Here's another prediction for you. In-home improvement, because it's going to be first, it's going to be the first chip to fall, and then it'll go through all B2C, then B2B. In-home improvement, what you're going to see is within the next year and a half, at least 90% of all companies in-home improvement are going to have a pricing estimator. It's going to be table stakes. It's going to be the norm.

[01:15:01:07 - 01:15:01:21]

Marcus Sheridan

You should go.

[01:15:04:19 - 01:16:08:03]

Stephanie Baiocchi

All right. Now, what do we think of that? Now, are you motivated to put pricing information on your site? See, not only is Google surfacing this information, and many AI summary tools will, they'll actually contact a company on your behalf. The AI, the agent can do that. And we know that agentic buying is coming. That's more a part of things. But it can report back and say, "Hey, yeah, they're available, but they don't have pricing. No pricing is listed." That experience can lose a customer before you even know you've lost them, before you even know you have anything to lose. And not necessarily to a competitor with a better product than you or better reviews, just someone who had their pricing accessible, someone who didn't feel like you were hiding something from them. So this is what the next 18 months looks like for businesses that don't build this infrastructure now. Eventually, you will stop showing up. And like Marcus said, it starts in-home improvement. It works its way out to all of B2C. And then all of B2B, we've seen this pattern before. So the companies that get ahead of this now, and that build the pricing, transparency, education, self-service tools, estimators, those are the ones that AI is going to surface when the buyer asks, moving forward. That's just the way it is.

[01:16:08:03 - 01:17:04:20]

Marcus Sheridan

You score in volume. Reviews are changing. They're changing for your business. They're changing for the customer as well, or the buyer. We've known reviews were important for years, but they just took a big step up in terms of their importance. So what do we mean by that? Well, we now know in terms of the way AI looks at reviews. It goes beyond this, but the fundamental components they're looking at is not just average rating and volume, in other words, number of reviews. But AI cares very much about review recency. In other words, if your company hasn't gotten recent reviews, AI sees that as a ding. They ding you for it. So you need to continue to get reviews because they don't want to feel like they're recommending a dead company, and AI pays a lot of attention to negative reviews. I've had a ton of businesses this year tell me, "I am so frustrated because we don't have many negative reviews, but AI literally quotes one of the negative reviews we get

[01:17:06:00 - 01:17:23:05]

Marcus Sheridan

when it talks to, when it gives results to homeowners or customers or whatever it might be." So this is quite interesting what's happening here, and we've got to pay attention to all of these things. So what's the future of reviews? In Mark my words, this is what's going to happen, something like this. So what I predict

[01:17:24:06 - 01:18:41:01]

Marcus Sheridan

is what AI is going to give you is what I'm going to refer to as a reputation graph. A reputation graph is essentially, imagine if you have the ability to spend the next year studying all about one company, reading every review they have ever been written about them, and just learning the details, ins and outs of everything everybody has said about them. That's what's going to happen with AI, and it's going to, of course, produce it in seconds. So what this means is, on a reputation graph, they're going to quickly let your customers know what your company's star rating is, the volume, the recency, the general sentiment, the top themes, platform consistency, complaint patterns that you've received, and your response behavior. Response behavior is becoming very important when it comes to reviews, and in fact, if you want to mitigate a really negative review, now what you need to do is you need to respond, and you can no longer just respond with the classic, "We're so sorry you had this problem, please call this number so that we can have a conversation about it." Because a lot of companies, that is a standard response of every single negative review, and AI will actually ding you for that, because what AI wants is real answers to the specific issue at hand.

[01:18:42:11 - 01:18:53:06]

Marcus Sheridan

So, if you messed up, you might just want to say, "Yes, we did mess this up. We are very sorry. Here's the system that we since implemented to make sure this doesn't happen again."

[01:18:53:06 - 01:21:04:06]

Stephanie Baiocchi

All right, a couple things to unpack here. I personally love the reviews aspect of all of this, because if you've been around since the days of The Ask You Answer, Marcus's first book before Endless Customers, the Big Five was first introduced in The Ask You Answer, and it stayed the same through the new book, Endless Customers. Reviews is one of the Big Five. It always has been, we know that this is something you have to put emphasis on by default if you're doing the Big Five is reviews. So, now you just have to make your reviews more visible to AI. Now, at the time of recording this, though things change rapidly, ChatGPT does not have access to Google's API. So, it can't read all your Google reviews directly. It can't skim all of them. It is your job to get reviews onto your own website in a format that AI can actually read and make them present. Now, are you going to filter out the bad ones? Probably. Is ChatGPT going to find them anyway somewhere else? Probably. So, all of these things are still true, but you do need to put your reviews in a place that AI can actually read them and structure them appropriately. When it comes to negative reviews, watch those red flag words, unsafe, ghosted, hidden fees. These aren't just bad reviews anymore. They're keywords that AI is specifically looking for when choosing whether or not to recommend you. So, we have to keep in mind, reviews are still part of the Big Five. They're fundamental. We have to make sure AI can see our reviews. We have to work to get a high volume consistency of reviews across platforms. I mean, I don't know about you, but when I am looking for reviews or looking for a product, I always look at reviews. I think my favorite thing is my mother-in-law will send me something and say, "Is this real or is this a scam?" And the first thing I do is look at reviews, obviously. And then, I look at complaints on their social media if someone left a review or left a complaint and see how the company responds. And so, that second part that Mark has said about you can't just say, "Oh, please reach us at customerserviceatcompany.com." Having someone actually respond makes you know the customer service of the company is there. You can trust them. Maybe there's a bad review, but it's worth taking a risk because it seems like they're going to take care of you. And that's really what people are looking for. They don't want to make a mistake with their money. So, reviews, very important. And get them in front of AI. All right, on to clip number five. Speaking of feeling safe, we got to talk about website security.

[01:21:04:06 - 01:21:31:17]

Marcus Sheridan

Website security. LLMs, chat cbg, POG, Gemini. They want you to have great security to your website. They want to make sure that you've got protected environments, clear security signals, verified identity, and safe transactional tasks. What does this really mean? Well, what I want you to do is I want you to create, if you don't have one already, a security and privacy page to your website. Some of you have heard me talk about this, but the best example I've ever seen is from the Whiskey Exchange.

[01:21:33:03 - 01:21:52:07]

Marcus Sheridan

When we send you out, when you get this particular slide deck from Impact, we'll send you these and I just want you to use this, feed it to your LLM like a chat to the E&C, hey, help me create a security and privacy page for AEO, following best AEO best practices.

[01:21:53:22 - 01:22:10:16]

Marcus Sheridan

Use this page as a model. Help me build this right now. And it will help you build it and then boom, you can have it probably in less than 60 minutes, you get a working privacy and security page. Raise your hand if you've got a security page that's robust, that's optimized on your site right now.

[01:22:12:09 - 01:22:14:19]

Stephanie Baiocchi

If you're not watching, I'll tell you, not a lot of hands went up in the room.

[01:22:16:04 - 01:22:42:13]

Stephanie Baiocchi

See, AI is essentially making sure they're not recommending a sketchy business. They wouldn't want to confuse my mother-in-law any more than I would. They want to make good recommendations. That's the AI's goal. So if your site doesn't signal that you're legitimate and safe and secure, it's quite a ding. If you build this page, it's super easy. Marcus just gave you the prompt, you can do it with AI in under an hour, just take the time to be forthcoming with your audience about the fact that you are legitimate and you're secure and explain why.

[01:22:43:16 - 01:22:51:23]

Stephanie Baiocchi

All right, clip number six. We're moving along. We've got 10 clips total, so we're about the halfway point. Let's see, editorial accuracy and schema.

[01:22:51:23 - 01:22:58:11]

Stephanie Baiocchi

You might have heard me say schema or structure a couple of times already. We're going to talk a little bit more about that now.

[01:22:58:11 - 01:24:10:07]

Marcus Sheridan

Accuracy. AI wants to know that the information that you're sharing, they want to know it's accurate. Now you have to prove it's accurate not just by delivering accurate information, but you want to make sure to go beyond that and show the process that you use. How do we do this? All right? The way we do this is once again our friends at Healthline who are ninjas at AI Visibility, they've got a page and I want you to have this page called your editorial process, our editorial process. So you have this page of your site, not hard to do. You can use this as the model. You go to Chance UPT or Claude, whatever, say act as an expert and answer engine optimization. I want you to help me create an editorial process page that shows the accuracy of our claims to make sure that AI realizes that we are sharing factual information. And then I want you to build it based on this template here from Healthline and help us build it for us and boom, you're cooking. So that's all you have to do. You've got the model there. You put in the prompt and you can build it.

[01:24:11:20 - 01:24:14:14]

Marcus Sheridan

Awesome page. They did so great. Make sure you read that and get a chance.

[01:24:15:17 - 01:24:20:03]

Marcus Sheridan

Nerd alert, nerd alert, nerd alert. Advanced schema deployment.

[01:24:22:10 - 01:24:23:15]

Marcus Sheridan

Don't be embarrassed about this.

[01:24:25:01 - 01:24:33:00]

Marcus Sheridan

Raise your hand. I just want to check on this again. Raise your hand. How many of you right now feel like you understand schema? Raise your hand.

[01:24:33:00 - 01:24:35:18]

Stephanie Baiocchi

There's about two hands up in that room.

[01:24:38:02 - 01:25:12:22]

Marcus Sheridan

This is the thing that is too for complicated that we are going to have to get good at. Schema is the practice of adding labels to your web pages. So Google and other AI tools instantly know what each thing is. So this means if you have a product page, your schema, this is kind of pricing page, schema, review page, schema, service area, everything else, author, video, all past schema, each and every one, schema, schema, schema. You've got to add it to the back side. Now unfortunately, some of you have been working with

[01:25:14:04 - 01:25:41:15]

Marcus Sheridan

companies that didn't tell you to ever worry about this. You've got to start worrying about schema. And if your web company is not telling you to pay attention to this, I would be worried about your web company because this is quite a big deal. Now, what you can do is you can go to this website and you can test the schema on your site. This is the easiest way to do it. You can put in a URL and this will quickly tell you if your web design company knows what they're doing or not.

[01:25:43:23 - 01:25:45:11]

Marcus Sheridan

You've got to have good schema.

[01:25:47:00 - 01:25:56:12]

Marcus Sheridan

In the future, if you do not have good schema, those agents that are sniffing are not going to find the things they need to find. For example, that online estimate

[01:25:58:07 - 01:26:05:18]

Marcus Sheridan

tool that you have on your site will not be seen as an estimated tool unless it's labeled an estimated tool. That's why that's such a big deal.

[01:26:05:18 - 01:26:20:13]

Stephanie Baiocchi

tool is validator.schema.org. We'll link that in the description. Go to that tool. Mark has mentioned. Paste in your URL. See where you stand. If you're doing a website redesign, this is the moment to get in front of it right from the ground up. If not, it is time to do that. Yes,

[01:26:22:22 - 01:26:32:09]

Stephanie Baiocchi

it's a nerd alert. Yes, it's maybe not as fun. But if your site's not labeled correctly, I can't understand what it is. And all this work you've done is for not. So got to do schema.

[01:26:33:15 - 01:27:06:03]

Stephanie Baiocchi

Let's move on a little bit to even more editorial accuracy and authority. And that comes from your team pages. We've always said that, you know, people are part of your brand. Be more human than others are willing to be is one of the four pillars of a known and trusted brand within the endless customer. And now there's a direct AI trust signal attached to it. A credentialed author page linked to your content is statistically more likely to be cited by AI because it has human expertise. It's documented and structured and that equals AI trust. So let's dig into that here.

[01:27:06:03 - 01:27:58:17]

Marcus Sheridan

All right. Author team pages. You've always had team pages, but now you need author pages. What do you mean by author pages? We want a page of the site that when somebody is a subject matter expert, there's a page on the site that the article or the video links to that describes them as an expert. All right. So if chat GPT has a choice and they can recommend a piece of content and source a piece of content that was great but had no author or it was great and had an author with the link to the author page and shows their credibility, chat GPT is going to choose the one with the credible author. So your job is to say here's not just a great piece of content, that micro authority that we talked about earlier, but here's the person that produced it and here's what makes them

[01:28:00:17 - 01:28:02:08]

Marcus Sheridan

verifiable or

[01:28:03:12 - 01:28:05:15]

Marcus Sheridan

qualified to talk about this subject.

[01:28:05:15 - 01:28:30:02]

Stephanie Baiocchi

All right. So with that, you need author pages and this used to be more of a thing. I feel like we had the bio, the author page, the author was linked on the article. So go back to that. Be more human than others are willing to be and credential your authors and tell AI through schema and structure that that's what this is. All right. So we're moving on clip number eight out of 10 coming up. This one's on content freshness and that doesn't just mean cool.

[01:28:30:02 - 01:28:39:01]

Marcus Sheridan

we've got content freshness. Here's what we know about AI. It does not like outdated information and over 50%

[01:28:40:01 - 01:28:44:10]

Marcus Sheridan

of all the content and sources and shares is less than a year old.

[01:28:46:05 - 01:28:47:18]

Marcus Sheridan

So what this means now

[01:28:48:22 - 01:29:07:05]

Marcus Sheridan

is you need to do what it takes to keep your content fresh. Now you've got a list here. We're not going to go over them all right now, but the first one is this. You visible last updated dates on all your blog articles on your major pages. For now on full stop.

[01:29:08:17 - 01:29:30:05]

Marcus Sheridan

We do not produce these things now without our last updated the way that this looks. If you go to the hub spot site, you'll see this updated 3 625. See that the bottom right now remember though this should be front facing for the viewer, but it also should be rear facing for the AI, which means you have to add

[01:29:31:13 - 01:29:57:16]

Marcus Sheridan

schema. Good. So you should have a schema that says what the last updated date is. So here's my recommendation for you. Every major piece of content, every major page, you now re update it every six months. There are six months. We just do it again every six months. You do it again. You don't have to update the content. If it's ever green, but you have to update the last updated

[01:29:58:20 - 01:30:06:20]

Marcus Sheridan

needs to be a standard. Now go build an agent that will do that for you. And when you do that, come and you teach this session on the next impact live.

[01:30:08:04 - 01:30:09:02]

Stephanie Baiocchi

I love that.

[01:30:10:04 - 01:30:58:01]

Stephanie Baiocchi

I'm hoping someone will build that agent. I started building one that was updating me on email subject open lines every Monday at 9 a.m. or email subject lines for open rate. And there's just so much power in that. And I want to reiterate what Marcus said about you need to be doing this every six months. Yes, you don't have to update the content, but you are reviewing the content to make sure nothing's changed. The whole point of this date is a trust signal that this is up to date information. So you do have to review the content. You can't just update the date, but if it's evergreen content, it's very unlikely to change. Great. We reviewed it. It's still up to date. Just take the time to do that and signal to people. I mean, how embarrassing is that? Someone thinks they found a relevant answer on your site and it is relevant, but it says last updated December, 2024. We're all going to question that a little bit, right? I know I would. All right. Clip number nine coming up.

[01:31:16:13 - 01:31:22:11]

Marcus Sheridan

And once again, the best policies page I've ever seen is helpline. So you want to create that page

[01:31:23:12 - 01:31:26:03]

Marcus Sheridan

right there for you. You've got a model.

[01:31:27:13 - 01:31:28:02]

Marcus Sheridan

Follow it.

[01:31:29:13 - 01:31:52:15]

Marcus Sheridan

A big one that we have been surprised with is awards and recognition. I've mentioned it a few times today, but LLMs love to reference awards and recognition. So what I want everyone in this room to now do, if you don't have it already, is to have a very robust page of your site that is just for awards and recognition. But when you do this,

[01:31:54:02 - 01:32:27:20]

Marcus Sheridan

this is Procter and Gamble's. And one of the things that they have done wrong here is they've got the award, but it should link back to the award and it should in one sentence or two explain why the award or why the certification, why it matters to the customer, what it means to the customer. And so with each award that you mentioned, with each recognition that you site, you want to say, and here's what that means to you. So let's just say we won the such and such award in 2025. And what that means to you is

[01:32:28:21 - 01:32:35:13]

Marcus Sheridan

we're going to have that. You'll be shocked at how much LLMs reference that page. You're going to do a lot for you.

[01:32:35:13 - 01:33:06:22]

Stephanie Baiocchi

All right. Get those awards. It's such a brag, right? We always love to say, we're the best. We got all these awards. This is the place to do it. But don't forget to add that piece about what it means for the buyer, for the consumer. And if you're like, man, we don't have any awards and you're doing all of this stuff, guess what? We have endless customers awards. They're called the Trust and Transparency Awards. The next season of them opens right after the 4th of July. So if you're listening to this and the applications haven't closed, I believe they're closing August 15th. Go check them out. And if you can add another award to your collection.

[01:33:07:23 - 01:33:18:08]

Stephanie Baiocchi

All right. We are on to the last clip. It's clip number 10. And this is one that has already come up a few times. It's so important. It's FAQs. All right. Let's take a look. Or listen.

[01:33:18:08 - 01:34:11:18]

Marcus Sheridan

Answer, focus, semantic structure. This one is on like green light big time becoming really important. The good thing is it's 100% aligned with what you've already learned with the ask you answer. But what we've always taught within that endless customers model is, hey, you create, for the most part, long form content to address these things. And because of that, you get more leads, more authority, et cetera. Now that's true, but you need to do that at micro level now. And this is through very intentional FAQ pages. Let me give you the best example I've ever seen. This company is called Rince. They're a laundry service in New York. And so Rince has a world class FAQ

[01:34:13:00 - 01:35:33:06]

Marcus Sheridan

section of their site. So what we're talking about here is they have their top questions. So just like them, you should have somewhere, let's say, on your navigation bar, somewhere in your menu, you've got FAQs. Then you go to an entire FAQ section. Within that FAQ section, you've got all of your, let's say, core services, top questions, et cetera. So in this case, their first one that they have is their top questions. Here's all the questions listed. And there's a drop down with a paragraph for each one. Now some of these are going to link to a video or an article that's longer form, but all the quick summary answers are here. But here's where it gets really good, like great. They also know there's a lot of frequently asked questions with respect to the people that have never been there before. And so they're asking about their first Rince the first time in the location. So there's a series of questions they answer once again. They have a series of FAQs for their services. They have them for a program that's called Rince and Repeat. They have them for a program that's called Rince and Go. And they have them for every other program. So the point is, you want to create an extremely robust FAQ. You can do that pretty quickly. And you will find that that gets you, side of that gets you sourced and everything gets better because of it.

[01:35:33:06 - 01:37:15:04]

Stephanie Baiocchi

And aside from the fact that I want to use Rince now, and I appreciate their branding, that's some killer FAQ, right? That probably puts most of our FAQ pages to shame. These are short, specific answers to real common questions, but they're organized by topic. They're easy for AI to parse. They're easy for a human to read. They're easy to cite. And they're in their most structured form. So this is the content we've always taught, but now with a more direct measurable line directly to AI. All right, that's our 10 tips from Marcus's session. Becoming the most known and trusted brand in your market, that's always been at the core of the endless customer system. But now you have to become the most recommended as well. So what Marcus showed us here is, you know, your market and what that means has expanded. It's not just your buyers, your potential buyers anymore. It's the AI they talk to before reaching out to you. That's now part of your market. So the signals that AI uses to choose who to recommend are the same things that buyers have always cared about. Transparent pricing, real people, honest, incredible answers to questions, real proven reviews, all of the things that people want to make a purchase decision. It's the same things that AI wants. What is different now is the thing that requires a little bit more of our attention is like the less obvious stuff. The infrastructure underneath that teaches AI how to read all of this and interpret all of this content. Schema, as we said multiple times, machine readable content, NAP consistency, remember way at the beginning, we said your name, address, phone number. There's a world of opportunity if you're listening, because most businesses and most of your competitors have not done this yet. And so this is what you need to do. This is going to be table stakes to be recommended by AI.

[01:37:15:04 - 01:37:56:01]

Stephanie Baiocchi

And lastly, if you want help doing any of this, prioritizing this work, if you're watching and listening and thinking, "Yeah, that's a lot of stuff I can do, but where do I begin? What do I do first?" If you want to become the most known, trusted, and recommended company in your market to humans and AI, that's exactly what our Endless Customers coaching program is designed to do. We will help hold you accountable. We will help you prioritize. If you want to learn more, just head to impactplus.com, book a call with us. Tom would love to talk to you, learn about your business, and explore what it looks like to have Endless Customers coaching in your organization. All right, that's it for me today. I'm Stephanie Byocchi, Director of Marketing and Events here at Impact, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Endless Customers podcast.

[01:37:57:19 - 01:38:04:05]

Stephanie Baiocchi

If you liked this episode, please take a minute to leave us a review. Thanks for checking out the Endless Customers podcast.