Top-of-Funnel Displacement

“Users are going and asking very detailed questions about our customers' products and trying to figure out what is the best product, what's the best version of the product. I always tell people, when people, it's a very hard process. No one likes to do it. It's no one's primary job to go and figure out what's this enterprise product that we have to implement across our organization, or even just for our department. It's always been a very hard thing that no one really likes, mostly because a lot of times getting the information has been very hard. Creating an apples-to-apples comparison is very hard, and LLMs are making that very easy. Now, whether it's doing it correctly or not, or doing it in your favor or not, is another question. But from the user standpoint, I suspect that people are asking very detailed questions that these companies don't have content to really support yet.”

“They're saying things like, "Look, I'm a midsize manufacturing company. We need a product that has this function, this function, this function. I want this type of licensing model." They are able to describe their problem. That's the only thing that they come into this process with at least some clarity about. The bridge has always been about trying to map their problem to your products, and to make it even harder, to map your product to other products and to be able to make that decision-making process feel accurate and complete. LLMs are helping with that tremendously. But in order for that to work, your company needs to actually be able to come up with super solutions, or synthetic solutions, that allow it to extrapolate correctly about how your product would work for the very specific situations that they are defining using LLM.”

“And it is a very interesting time, because it's not about creating a thousand solutions. It's about, how do you essentially break down your solutions into atomistic parts, so that the LLM can appropriately recombine them and then talk about them in a way that minimizes hallucination and extrapolation? Because that's what people are doing on LLM. The role of a lot of our clients', let's say, marketing website has shifted from, or probably will continue to shift even more so from, discovery to confirmation or validation. That is really changing the role of what a website is supposed to do, and what becomes important on that. Now you have to figure out, if you assume that someone is having an experience on LLM and will eventually come to your website, then you have to figure out, what's that graceful bridge? Like, what have they been set for? What, when they actually do hit your website, what do they need to know? What do they already know? Which is hard, because LLMs are a bit of a black box right now, right? So you don't know, you can only kind of guess based on where they entered into.”

“Yes. And all of our clients have noted that their organic SEO is just getting brutalized, because you're getting those Gemini answer overviews that are happening there, and a lot of people are shifting to an LLM and they're doing their discovery there. So the ability to precisely understand what people are [doing], and this is a problem, because all these companies have spent the last 10 years optimizing their SEO and they want to have the same type of inbound tracking that they've grown very accustomed to. Their ability to tune it and their ability to understand it, it feels like we're right back to the very beginning of Google organic search and Google AdWords, where people were trying to game or guess the algorithm. That's where we are right now with LLM. All the strategy around inbound LLM is basically, "How do I game it? How do I optimize for it?”

“So I'm most likely to be cited, my answers are accurate, I have a large share of voice," all these different things. But at the end of the day, you have almost zero visibility into that. All the tools that are springing up right now, like Profound and Semrush and things like that, they're trying to mimic that sense of control, but it's really not, because, like, Profound is basically taking the 10 quote-unquote most likely answers, or most likely questions, that people have, and hitting those LLMs again and again and trying to say, "Well, this is what it's most likely saying." But there's no guarantee that that's actually what it's saying, or what people are engaging with. Never mind the fact that, the ability to model and understand what the structure of the entire conversation looks like, that's another thing. When you talk to your clients and they're like, "Oh well, someone says, 'Show me the top five competitor companies that do X,'" and they pop up, they're like, "Well, that's probably good enough." You're like, "Well, that's really just the first question of what is likely at least a five- to ten-point of engagement. And where does that end up? Where does that conversation end up?" That is a big thing for our customers, our clients, trying to understand: how does LLM fit into the overall customer journey? How is the customer journey being changed by this? Then what do they need to do in terms of optimizing their website to really do the things that LLMs can't do very well? When someone is coming in, they can pick up that baton. The top part of that customer journey, the product discovery part of the journey, is being compressed and happening elsewhere. But the other parts of that customer journey, which is, not the discovery, not even the high-level consideration, but the "okay, let's get into it" type of part of stuff, that is still critically important for these websites to be able to do. But the pathways to that, they don't have the information about what does that maturation look like? What are people ready for? How should we, like, we don't want to push that stuff too far, because there is going to be a certain portion of people who are still like, "Now, what are you all about?”